Where To Jumpstart Your Blogging Interest

Blogging has become popular than it changes the way we read news and explore interesting subjects. No need to dive deep into how it becomes popular and how it disrupts the traditional of news delivery. In this post, I’m going to give you all the information you need to choose and start a blog platform that fits your ideal intention. First, I’m going to introduce blogging types and then I’m going to explain each blogging platform and its features.

First, blogging is not all about writing an online article anymore. Web technology changes every year and brings us more powerful features than ever. For me, there are typically four types of blogging:

1. Article: As the name suggests, each article blogging means you have to write out pieces of each post in words. Each post will represent a topic that is related to our blog’s focus. For example: a cooking recipe post is a very good article for a blog about food. And a post about Android layout is appropriate for a blog about mobile systems. Article blogging usually has a chance to dig deep into a particular subject. Moreover, article blogging is becoming our usual tool to deliver in-depth news.

2. Picture: People nowadays are busy and they do not want to waste time to sit down and type in their thoughts and experiences. As an old saying “A picture worth a thousand words”, we are getting more and more adapted to the idea of posting pictures every single day. Those pictures might be about our recent trip to Yosemite. They could be some screenshots explaining the process that designers have to go through to produce a poster. Picture blogging usually engages users more because of its interesting nature; ease of understanding and eye satisfaction.

3. Status: This type of blogging has become mainstream on the internet. Many celebrities and leaders around the world updates their status every single hour to deliver the news to their followers. For status blogging, a comment on recent event or on a specific subject is usually short and concise. Often status includes links to a particular web page that can explain more about the subject.

4. Video: Video blogging is the most versatile technique to gather a mass of followers. With programmers and designers, video seems to beat other types of blogging since video provides much more details and interesting view on a particular subject. People often look around and find online videos to watch on a specific topic rather than find articles and read them.

Well, that is quite a summary of types of blogging that you should consider before going into blogging.

You should take advantage of new blogging technology because it often saves you a ton of time to achieve the same result and get you a large audience quickly.
In the next paragraph, I'm going to discuss each blogging platform and give you a nice overview.

1. Blogger

Blogger is historically the founding father of blogging. The platform is easy to use and free of charge. Many novices find Blogger the best platform to produce articles on their particular subjects. Due to the nature of easy-to-use, Blogger's features are limited and professionals find it hard to tweak the blog design to their liking. You should notice Blogger belongs to Google so your Google account works fine with blogger. In fact, Blogger is integrated into the Google ecosystem so well that you can write a blog and your Google+ automatically updates. More than that, Google ecosystem allows Blogger to integrate with Google Adsense. This feature allows you to place ads on your blog and generate revenues.

2. WordPress

Wordpress is the most popular blogging framework at the moment. Users are able to change the design and add more features to their Wordpress blogs by plug-ins. This allows professionals to use Wordpress to create dynamic websites for their customers. In fact, Wordpress is so powerful that manyweb designers are encouraged to use it as a platform to showcase their talent. In Wordpress, you can change CSS and add PHP or Javascript. Wordpress is pretty much an open source software. That is the reason Wordpress can be easily modified to any purposes that users want it to be. It can become a nightmare for novice at first but once you grasp the basics, it just become a nice and powerful system for your project. Wordpress is free for download at Wordpress.org. And Wordpress.com provides free and paid hosting service.

3. Ghost

Ghost is a new blogging platform, created in 2013. It is open source and free. Ghost takes advantage of simple interface to let blogger focus on their content, instead of the look of their blog. It also promotes Markdown which is the popular writing method for online writers. In Markdown, you typically write out the style of your headings and subtitle and so on in easy code. This feature allows users to quickly write the content and the look of a post as fast as possible. Ghost is also easy to use on mobile devices. Ghost is like Blogger so it is very easy to use for novice. It is free for download at Ghost.org.

4. Twitter

Twitter is absolutely great for updating status. Many celebrities and leaders use Twitter to deliver their message. Twitter can be considered to be a news platform. Many news network such as CNN, NBC, FOX, The New York Times and others put Twitter into great use. It surely reminds us of the Arab Spring revolution. This platform allows normal people to deliver news in such a way that no other news network can compete with. You can use mobile devices to update your status many times a day. It is definitely good for novice and professionals .

5. Flickr

Flickr belongs to Yahoo and it is a fabulous photo hosting platform on the internet. People often blog about certain trips they take, a certain restaurant that they recently dine at, or a certain product they have used. Flickr gives you the unlimited storage for your pictures. There are a huge photographer community on Flickr. If you are a photographer or a designer, do not hesitate to give it a try. You just need to blog your story through pictures regularly.

6. Youtube

I have no need to say anything about Youtube. It is so popular and powerful. Many bloggers take advantage of free and easy to upload videos to produce a series of how-to videos that capture a big number of followers. I consider Youtube as a blogging platform because it provides new way to engage the readers through images and audio. There is a term to refer to this trend called V-blogging. It is free and easy to use just like other products from Google.

References

Blogger. (n.d.). Blogger Features. Retrieved from Blogger: https://www.blogger.com/features

Ghost. (n.d.). Ghost - Just A Blogging Platform. Retrieved from Ghost: https://ghost.org

Pogue, D. (2013, 05 29). New Flickr: Vast Space for Storage, at No Cost. Retrieved from NYTimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/technology/personaltech/the-new-flickr-space-and-more-space-free.html

Stone, B. (2012, 03 01). Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn't Die. Retrieved from BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-01/twitter-the-startup-that-wouldnt-die

Walker, R. (2012, 06 28). On YouTube, Amateur Is the New Pro. Retrieved from NYTimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/on-youtube-amateur-is-the-new-pro.html?pagewanted=all

WordPress. (n.d.). The Features You'll Love. Retrieved from Wordpress.com: http://en.wordpress.com/features/

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QR Code Technology

Denso Wave invented QR Code, according to QRCode.com. QR Code was used for tracking vehicles, products in the early days. Now, QR Code becomes more popular because it can help people get to a website or a product quickly. 

There are a number of ways to scan a QR Code. The usual way is to use an imaging scanner to scan the code. Another wide-spread way is to use a smartphone. With the boom of smart phones in recent years, QR Code becomes a media hype for some time. People would use QR Code to access a website, read information about a particular product, and to register for an event on the spot. 

It has become a trend to include QR Code in a business card. Acquaintances are able to scan the code and get to your personal website. This way, a business card transforms into a secret code to a person's online information. 

Many companies have taken advantage of QR Code technology in wearable devices. For example, a technology start-up called Layar has developed an app for the Google Glass device. This app is very capable of reading QR Code from a magazine, a poster, a business card, or even a wall. These QR Code can provide quickly the extra materials, addition to the original contents that users are looking at. This makes QR Code becomes tremendously helpful for any companies providing streaming contents to the users.

QR Code might not be a hot trend after a few years since it first became popular. Still, the technology is useful for many years to come.


References

Layar. (n.d.). What is Augmented Reality. Retrieved from Layar: https://www.layar.com/augmented-reality/

QRCode.com. (n.d.). What is QR Code? Retrieved from QRCode.com: http://www.qrcode.com/en/about/

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CYBER SECURITY AND HUMAN MISTAKES

In recent years, cyber security has become a popular topic. The government worries confidential data could be hacked by outsiders. Businesses and people are constantly reminded of new security technology to protect their data. Many hackers now, thanks to many popular social network websites, can organize themselves and attack their targets more frequently.

Some hacking examples include the recent NSA classified documents released to the public. Edward Snowden is one of the CIA and NSA employees and also a computer specialist. The leaked documents reveal a global surveillance program that these agencies use for many years. People are concerned greatly about the effect of this program on privacy rights.

Another example is Target breach to its customer personal information. Some hackers use a vendor's credentials to gain access to Target's computer system. After they gained access, the customer database was hacked. Target later reported that customer personal information such as name, address, credit card numbers were taken. This incident puts Target in a difficult spot and at the same time warns other businesses to better improve their security systems.

Lastly, Facebook hacking happens more frequently than we think. Many Facebook user accounts have been hacked and taken advantage by Facebook apps. These apps use Access Token to gain access to Facebook API which returns user personal information and the privilege to post on their behalf.

There are no certain ways to protect user data as long as human mistakes happen. Notice in the first example, Edward Snowden obviously has access to the CIA server. And in the last example Facebook users voluntarily accept apps' access to their account. These human mistakes can be prevented if people learn how to safeguard their online data better.

References

Harris, E. A., & Perlroth, N. (2014, 03 13). Target Missed Signs of a Data Breach. Retrieved from NYTimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/business/target-missed-signs-of-a-data-breach.html

Perkel, J. (2010, 04 28). Cybersecurity: How safe are your data? Retrieved from Nature News: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100428/full/4641260a.html

Risen, J. (2013, 09 28). N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens. Retrieved from NYTimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

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GIT AND THE FUTURE OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

For as long as we can remember, programmers were expected to be hidden away in a sealed cavern. They should have their eyes stare at a computer screen and their fingers punch at keyboard nonstop. At the end, a marvelous technology toy would appear on the screen that would have the power to control the world. Fortunately, it is not true anymore.

Nowadays, programmers, or software engineers as we like to call ourselves, are very likely to work with someone else either on “big bucks” closed projects or small open-source projects. We don't work in an isolated environment because we prefer open space so that we can share what we do and create quality software faster. For software developers, this poses a problem. How can we work and share our code with each other? Imagine I write my code yesterday but it is sluggish and hard to understand. The next day, somebody in my group jumps in and improve it. The problem is my code does not look the same as it did yesterday. So I start looking around and spend my precious time to figure out the changes that he made.

In the past, computer scientists anticipated this problem and they solved it. A version control system was created; some examples are CVS and Subversion. At first, the version control systems were proprietary but then they started to become open-source and free to the world. The main feature is to allow developers to make changes directly to a central repository, an online place to hold the code. Unfortunately, if many developers contribute to a project, they have to wait for their turn to make changes to the code so that nobody would have mess up somebody's work by accidentally deleting, moving, changing, or replacing the “everyone” code.

These centralized version control system tended to work better in the previous decades because at that time computers were slow and people had a tendency to make changes at a meeting before implementing those changes in code. But in the present, things seem to move very fast. Developers have more high speed connections and more powerful computers. Moreover, developers are now expected to come up with new features and have them demoed at a meeting within a few hours. 

To help these developers in these modern situations, a new version control system was born. Git is created by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Git is an open-source project and categorized as distributed version control. At first Git was only for version control of code, but now Git can help people keep track changes of many types of file such as text files or images. The idea is when you want to make changes to a project, you check it out. It means you copy the whole project to your own computer and start typing code in. You create new features on your version of the project while Git takes care of the rest. When you are ready to submit your changes to the central repository, all you have to do it is submit your code to merge with the existing code. Git lets other developers know what changes you have made and what changes others have made. These things keep the code relevant for all developers working under the same project so that during a sprint, a group can come up with many more features instead of the group solely work for one feature.

Unfortunately, Git is a command line tool. Every programmer has to type some commands in a black computer terminal to make git work as it is supposed to. In order to make it more visual appealing and easier to control with a click-and-drag from a mouse, Github is born. 

Github provides a web based interface for Git. It also has nice features for collaboration and task management tools. One of the features is the social network graph which is to display how collaborators work on their versions of a repository. Many other features includes analytics tools and feeds. While private repositories cost money, public repositories are completely free. That explains why since Github's birth in 2008 the service has grown so fast that now it becomes the most popular collaborating tools for developers. 

According to Techcrunch website, on 1/16/2013 Github had 3 million developers. And on Github website on 12/23/2013, 10 million repositories existed. It now becomes a platform for many popular open source projects such as the website template, Bootstrap; the web app server tool, NodeJS; the blogging platform, Ghost; and many others. 

Open source projects are great because they are free to the world. And bugs can be fixed quickly and found easily by a large group of contributors. Everyone can see the code and none can create malicious code. This put open source projects in an advantage stage over some closed project. We are using a lot of open source software; among them are web standards such as HTML and CSS, Javascript and our operating systems may come from the same open source software Unix. 

More and more people are contributing to open source projects that they believe can make the world better. These projects won't have much feature impact if they do not have a strong version control system, such as Git to manage their code and a powerful Git platform, such as Github to back it up. In a recent move to hire more qualified programmers, many companies start to look at a student's contribution to open-source projects in order to examine closely his coding skill. As long as open technology is still useful and advances our science frontier forward, open-source projects such as Git and service Github play an important role in software engineering.




References

Finley, K. (2012, 07 14). What Exactly Is GitHub Anyway? Retrieved from TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/14/what-exactly-is-github-anyway/

Git. (n.d.). About. Retrieved from Git: http://git-scm.com/about

Rothwell, R. (2008, 08 05). Creating wealth with free software. Retrieved from FreeSoftwareMagazine: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/creating_wealth_free_software

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