Servo - June 2009

Tune in each month for a heads-up on where to get all of your “robotics resources” for the best prices!

Blogging Your Way

to Robotics Stardom

Wup in the mid 1990s, having your own web page was the hen the Web first popped

in thing. Back then, just about all sites were static. You created — usually by hand — the coding for the page, uploaded it, and then watched as the relatively few people on the Internet found your site.

Before long though, enterprising individuals like Matt Wright and others came up with simple tools for things like guestbooks and basic posting forums. The Interactive Web was born, and it’s been going full speed ever since.

These days, the hot ticket is the blog — a contraction of the already short word weblog. At the risk of telling you something you probably already know (but for the sake of completeness), blogs are like personal diaries where you can post an article about anything you like. If you permit it, visitors to your blog can post comments about your article. Blogs are a form of specialized community forum where the topics are generally created and controlled by the owner of the blog.

(In community forums like the one provided for SERVO and Nuts & Volts at forum.servomagazine.com, anyone can start a new topic — usually a question or plea for help — and anyone can respond with answers. Be sure to head over there if you haven’t already!)

Thanks to numerous free platforms provided by Google and others, just about anyone with a

computer and Internet connection can create and maintain their own blog. You can write about any topic you like, but of course the topic of interest to all of us here is robotics. You don’t need your own Internet server or even your own domain name. Just sign up to the service, set up the look and feel of your new blog (takes about 15 minutes), and start writing. If you happen to have your own server and Internet domain, you can create your own fully customized blog using free software such as WordPress.

In this installment of Robotics Resources, we’ll discuss what you need to start your own robotics blog and how to keep your blog fresh and useful to anyone visiting it.

Why Start a Blog

At their basic level, blogs are just like regular web pages, except they use a mechanism to make it easier to update the pages with new information. Most people use blogs as a form of daily (or weekly or monthly) journal, and the format of blog pages reflect that. The most recent entries are placed at the top and older entries get pushed down or are moved to an archive section.

For robotics, you might start a blog to keep interested folks updated on your latest project(s). Each entry you post might contain your progress, including parts and supplies you’ve used. You might discuss the challenges of the design and how you overcame them.

Your blog might also contain pointers to newsworthy stories about robotics or essays where you explain your philosophy. You can write blog entries that teach a concept or demonstrate a method or procedure. Blogs can contain text, images, videos, and other media, and you’re free to link to other sources when appropriate.

Because a blog is a journal, they’re a great tool for instruction and learning. Teachers can create a blog to help students with their assignments. Students can maintain a blog to show their work and how it’s progressing. Blogs can be updated by a single individual or multiple people, making it ideal for group projects.

Free and Low Cost Blogging Platforms

To make a blog, you must have a web server running blog software. By far, most blogs you’ll find on the Internet are contained on free and low cost blogging hosts. These are companies that operate web servers and maintain the blog software for you.

One of the biggest is Blogger.com, operated by Google. (Note that another blogging platform, blogspot.com, is also operated by Google and is functionally the same.) In the free camp, there’s also WordPress which offers free blog hosting in addition to free software you can use on your own web server — more about this later.