Tutorials

Creating a blog for free

First, what is a blog? A web log (blog) is an online chronological diary of postings intended for public reading and commenting.

Second, where can I create a blog? I suggest you use either Blogger.com or Wordpress.com, but if you are familiar with other services, or want to experiment with other services, by all means use those (examples, include livejournal.com, xanga.com, and posterous.com)

• Via Blogger
  • Go to http://www.blogger.com/
  • Sign up for an account and learn how to create postings (a video tutorial on signing up is available here).
• Via Wordpress
  • Go to http://wordpress.com
  • Sign up for an account and learn how to create postings (Text instructions are availbale here.  A video tutorial on signing up is available here and a video tutorial on creating your own posts is available here).

Utilizing RSS

RSS is a simple and easy way to collect content from the web without having to visit individual sites. If you have been visiting your colleagues' blogs you realize by now how time consuming it is to visit each and every one of these blogs to see if new content is posted. RSS feeds enable you to gather all the content that interests you within one service and view it from there instead of visiting the individual blogs. Watch the video below for a quick and clear description of RSS:

After watching the video, create an account at Google Reader, and you can start reading everyone's blogs through there. If you have a blogger or gmail account you will be able to use that username/password to log in and use Google Reader. If you don't have an account with google, you will need to create one. 

Once you have an account created, follow the steps below to import everyone's blogs into your reader:

1. Right-click on this link and save this file on your desktop (this file is a collection containing everyone's blogs).

2. View the video below explaining how to import the file you downloaded into Google Reader