Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

7.2. Blogs

Weblogs, also known as blogs, are a very useful way to deliver content to an interested audience on a regular basis. Unlike the early days of the web, blogs have easy-to-use tools for publishing new content. Paired with RSS, the readers of a blog can easily get the latest post from your site using the aggregation tools discussed earlier in this chapter.

Blogs were created in the late 1990s and with the advent of XML, RSS shortly followed. Together blogs and RSS started gaining popularity and each year, more and more people started using them. Even though the stereotypical blog user is a teenager, many blogs and blog communities have formed in the Microsoft technology field and have become a popular way of getting up-to-date information about upcoming technologies and ways of using current ones. Microsoft sites like MSDN and TechNet give readers the ability to get to know more about what Microsoft is doing straight from the employee's mouths.

7.2.1. Overview of Blogs

Blogs are very simple by nature. The typical blog has a main page for delivering content in reverse chronological order. Blogs also allow the author to categorize the content so that readers can pick and choose what is most relevant to them. To add to a blog, owners log in to a secure portion of their site and using a simple HTML creation tool, publish new content easily. Other techniques, such as using third-party tools located on the owner's machine to publish content via well-known weblog APIs to the ...