“OK, so I arrived here by pressing a button on the excellent Quantock Online web site. I’m not stupid but, to be honest, I don’t really know what a blog is. And what’s the orange thing at the top of the page that says ‘RSS Feed’ all about?”

Well, a blog is short for “Web Log”. It’s just a system that organises articles in chronological order, often used as a form of on-line diary. The initial idea behind this one is to let you know about some of the good stuff that I find on the Internet and to answer some computer related questions. We’ll see how it develops…

Using the blog

The fairly obvious

Mostly the blog should be pretty easy to follow. Stuff that I write is ordered by date - newest posting first. Longer postings show only a snippet with a link to the full article. Posts are also put into categories so that you can just look at the type of topic you might be interested in. Older posts are filed by month in archives. There is also a search box to help you find that pearl of wisdom you read some time ago - but has now been buried!

Not quite so obvious

At the bottom of each post there are two links. The link on the left tells you which category the post is in - clicking on this shows you posts in that category. The link on the right tells you if anyone has commented on the post.

Clicking on either the title of the post, or the comment link at the bottom both take you to a page displaying just that post. The only difference is that the link from the title takes you to the top of the article, whilst the comment link takes you to the comments at the bottom of the article. Please feel free to add comments - but they won’t show up immediately because they are first checked for spam (another story). Comment on this article if you like.

Ignore any links that say ‘trackback URI’ - only useful to people with their own blog. You can also ignore orange buttons with ‘RSS Feed’, I’ll probably explain them in a post.