Blog Hosting Software

As communication becomes more global, blog hosting software has replaced the party telephone lines of the 1980s. Today's internet user is more hands-on than ever before, and considers himself an owner of the world wide web far more than he considers himself simply a user. It has become so simple to have your own website, to send mass email messages from a cluttered living room and to traffic internet communications from a personal desktop computer by using blog server software. If internet articles are the editorial letters of yesteryear, then blogging is the forgotten art of note writing. Blogs can take the form of social commentary, how-to article, response to a community of speakers and much more. Simply put, blogs are personal comments posted on a server available to be read by other internet users. Through the use of many applications, a blog can allow comments and archive old posts for future viewing.

Blogware, the term given to blog server software, is a specialized application package that contains content management systems that directly deal with blogging maintenance, techniques and needs. There are many blogware programs that are available free to download on a user's personal computer. Many of these are free and can be modified and redistributed. Others, however, are proprietary and have to be purchased for a fee. The proprietary blogware cannot be distributed to those without a license to own it. There is another type of blogware that is only offered through the creator's website. The blogger can use it for free or sometimes for a small fee. This kind of blogware usually focuses on hosting the posts on the internet, but occasionally also encompasses editing and updating the entries as well. Maintaining a blogging site is almost exclusively done via the internet. Blog hosting software allows the owner to make edits and updates to an existing post using a web based interface.

There are universal features found in all blog server software, and there are a few unique capabilities offered by a few blogging applications providers. All applications offer the ability to title the blog and a section to place the body text in. Another universal feature of blog hosting software is the ability to provide a hyperlink to the full body of the article if the body text only represents a portion of the content. In addition, all applications date the entry for archiving purposes. Some optional features offered by blog server software are the ability for readers to write publishable comments to the blogs and the ability to categorize the entries to make it easier to locate them when searching by topic.

Many blogware applications allow the author to create static pages. The content of these pages does not change or remains relatively the same throughout the life of the blog. Pages differ from blog entries in that they do not change as often and are not time dependent. For example, many blogsites have pages introducing the writers of the contributions. The more pages a blogger includes on the server, the more like a professional website the blogspace will appear to be. Most blogware programs support web syndication so that the content may referenced by web aggregator software. Applications that offer this have a ping mechanism that automatically notifies several search sites that information has been updated. In this way, the search engine will drive traffic to newly updated posts. The growing popularity of pinging servers as updates are made has lead to ping spam or sping. An example of sping is product manufacturers that have advertisements that are "bloglike." There are even software companies that have blogs filled with search engine optimized words that update every hour to be competitive in the getting web traffic.

Weblog applications offer the ability to moderate posts. Some software packages offer an interface that requires a moderator to look at all the posts and comments before they are able to be viewed by the web audience. Then there are other packages that require bloggers to join the server. All members can enter c comments to all the other members' posts. If a nonmember tries to comment, they will simply be denied access and asked to join the group. In both of these scenarios the owner of the weblog is able to prevent defamatory posts and off topic comments. Posting varies from blogware to blogware. Some blog hosting software allows the user to right click on any portion of text to open up a pop up window ready to accept text. Others require a form to be filled out and entered to post an entry. The simplicity of the form varies widely between weblog applications. Most all weblog packages offer the capability to post thumbnails of photos and other graphics to accompany a post.

Blog scraping is another activity blog server software is trying to safeguard against. Scraping is the practice of looking through a large number of blogging sites, usually on a daily basis, in order to find and steal content. Most scrapers only steal the content that has the most keywords in it so their own keyword relevance is quite high. Secondly, they leave out all other links within the original post, so that their own search engine ranking is higher than even the original poster. This can be quite detrimental to businesses that operate blogs. It is also proving harmful to individuals with strong moral convictions about topics. "Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar." (Proverbs 30:6) For example, a scraper can post content on a pornographic site even if the source for the original information is morally opposed to the pornographic material. Blog hosting software is diligently seeking to address some of these pressing issues.

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