Should You Blog or Go Traditional?

It seems that everyone has a blog these days. A blog is a website in every sense of the word. There is no technical difference between a blog and a traditional website. It is true that blogs do rely more heavily on PHP than HTML (two programming languages designed for web use) but there are plenty of purely PHP sites out there that have nothing to do with blogging. PHP was invented as a means of simplifying updates to web pages, that simplification is what led to the explosion of blogs. So what makes a blog webpage different? Well first you need to understand what blogs are different from.

A traditional webpage, written in HTML, required knowledge of the html programming language in order to make even minor changes to a web page let alone create a completely new one. And if you wanted to change the phone number that shows up on the bottom of your web pages you had to go in and change it on every page. PHP changed that. You would insert a block of PHP code that was labeled “phone number” into each of your pages. After that if you wanted to change the number you changed it in one place and it showed up on all of your pages. Very nice indeed.

Well then someone figured out that they could make a website where all the pages were identical except for the title of the page and the text of the article. So they used a bunch of PHP modules to design a web page template and any time you wanted to create a new page you simply typed the title and article text into the appropriate boxes and hit enter. So effectively, overnight, creating web pages went from requiring knowledge of programming languages to being able to type a title in one box and some text in another. How awesome is that?

Of course these early blogs were very simple in design. It took a while before the abilities to add music and pictures were added and there still remain a lot of limitations as to what you can do with a blog. Not because blog pages are not capable, a blog page can technically do anything that an html page can do; it’s just that no one has designed the “paste it here” boxes for many of the functions yet. They will.

So if you want full blown creative freedom and power, learn HTML and PHP. Then go out and design some of the most stunning blogs to be found. If you are more concerned about the content, kind of let the words do the talking, then use the blogging tools that are available. You can have your blog up and running in less time than it took to read this article and now you know what is blog.

Posted in: Blogger