About Blogs

It would be useful to make an analysis of what blogs are (and what they are not), as well as locating some real-world examples showing the various uses of blogs.

Co-incidentally, there was an article this week in the free newspaper Metro about blogs, connected to the Best of Brit Blog Awards 2007. So, as a start, I'll quote from its introductory paragraph.

Blogs have changed the way people communicate, the way the media works and the way information spreads around the world. They have also been responsible for a significant increase in the number of kitten pictures in the world. In the world of blogs, you can find just about anything: informed political commentary that outdoes many papers, deeply involving personal stories, hysterically funny humour writing – and pictures of kittens.

Interestingly, I have just noticed that the word blog is not in Word 2003's spelling check dictionary yet, a mere 4 years later, blogging is so notable that there are national awards dedicated to them!

And, mreow, here is the obligatory kitten picture:

The Project Goals

At the start we collectively decided on 5 key project goals.

1. Produce a blog recording our ongoing experiences of learning Web Development at Stow College.
2. Use the blog to make contacts to further our study and careers.
3. Use the blog to assist future students.
4. Use the blog to record and assess other sources of information about web development.
5. Assess whether blogging is the right medium to achieve these goals.

The good and the bad

A moment ago, I was typing about a few of the brighter sides of Blogger, and was ready to praise the system for being quite user friendly. However, I made a mistake by using the "Undo" feature to attempt to rectify a mistake in my typing, and discovered that all of my work dissapeared. Apparantely, Blogger's blogging system doesn't like "Undo" commands, and enjoys interpreting them as "Delete".

Anyway, a few more problems arose: after forgetting my username, I entered the wrong one whilst logging in, and discovered that there was no way to "log out" -- Blogger just kept asking me for my password. Of course, since this wasn't my correct username, there was no way for me to log in or out, so I had to clear my cookies manually and restart I.E. Not very practical or convenient.

Also, Blogger's "forgotten password" feature sees the user being sent straight to another website - google.com - which isn't the most convenient or user-friendly solution to recovering your password, since the two websites (run by the same company) do not appear to integrate very well at all.

But now onto the good points. The blogging interface is relatively good (aside from that "Undo" problem) as it lets the user make use of keyboard short cuts (ctrl+B for bold or ctrl+i for italics) and has a full range of formatting and alignment features to rival those of the old Wordpad for Windows.

Finally, HTML can be added or edited to your liking, so images and multimedia can of course be included, something which would be immensly useful to make your blog a bit more aesthetically pleasing, like so:

Week 4 - addressing our setup problems

After re-assessing the way we had initially set up our account (blogcraft1) with blogger.com we decided to re-register using another name.
This was because we decided that it would be best to have a collective admin name which we could all post under, as well as each having their own individual user names.

Week 4 - Blogger's pitfalls

As you can see, our group has recently been in the process of configuring a Blogger.com blog accessible by all three members, and in doing so has encountered some problems which, at the moment, make Blogger.com a little less appealing for group work.

Firstly, as you'll read in Steve's post, we've had to change our name and during that process we had trouble setting up each member's access to the blog.

Secondly, on creating my own personal account, I noticed that the Blogger.com signup process is a little self-involved for my tastes. By that, I mean that if you create a Google account via Blogger.com, you'll be forced to - at the same time - create your own blog page. This obviously takes up valuable time for those of us who don't want a personal blog, and distracts from the main reason for signing up in the first place -- to take part in a group blog. To solve this, all Blogger technicians would have to do is implement a simple choice option - Would you like to create your own, personal blog at this time?

I had to go to Google.com to create a Google account simply because I didn't want a blog. So, ultimately, at the moment Blogger is not looking like the be-all-end-all solution to group work.

Our First Posting

This is the start of our blog, chronicling our time of study at Stow College, Glasgow. We are: Ewan McIntyre, Steven Sim, and Greg Nelson.We are currently in our third week of study, on a fast track course studying Web Development to HNC level. We will try and update this weekly (on a Thursday) at least.