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.
SERVO 06.2009
67