Keeping a Weblog
I use weblogs to get students making Web pages, starting with the basics of 1993-era HTML and gradually getting to forward-looking standards-compliant HTML. A log can be a dated series of pages made with any tool -- a word processor with HTML export; a plain text editor like Notepad (Windows) or SimpleText (Mac), a "real" HTML editor like Homesite, Arachnophilia or (Mac) BBEdit; or a feature-rich near-WYSIWYG page editor like Dreamweaver or Netscape/Mozilla Composer. (Homesite comes with Dreamweaver; both are part of Macromedia Studio MX, $800 for "civilians" and $200 for students. All of the other packages mentioned are free, at least in a "lite" version.) For more dedicated log-keeping, you can use a specialized weblog program.
Elsewhere I've mentioned several log programs, including Blogger and Radio (which I'm using here), but today let's look at Livejournal.com, an open source project using software clients made by volunteer programmers.
After a little browsing around, you'll see that you can spend $25 a year to help support the project, which provides you with server space. The software to connect to the server is free.
"Community" angles: You can locate other users by topic or location; some users publish to the world, others restrict their journal to a list of friends. Readers can reply to journal entries and build message threads.
Results: close to half a million journal-keepers in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands in dozens of other countries. When you search for a topic, you find out not only which people are interested (if not specializing) in that topic, and how recently they have posted something new -- down to the second.
Question: Why choose to read something written by an amateur writer and total stranger when you could be reading a "Great Book," or even a "banned book? One answer might be the chance of stumbling on something interesting, like that Banned Book Week link, which I found in someone's Live Journal.
Writing style
Writing for the Web should be readable. Too many logs read like sixth grade diaries -- but sometimes that's what they are. Marc Bernstein, who has been publishing hypertexts since before the Web, has a new essay on this subject, titled Writing the Living Web.
It's part of an online publication called "A List Apart," which changes its top article from time to time, and has talked about weblog writing before. One point these writers and their readers emphasize is brevity, so I'll stop right here and get back to "having a weekend."
12:51:06 PM 
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