A blog (sometimes referred to as a weblog) is a personal Web site that is frequently updated. Most blogs are rather
personal in nature, with their founders using them as a sort of "online diary." They'll talk about their day, what
they're plans are for the weekend, their relationships, their views on world events and politics, and so on.
More interestingly, there are a number of blogs that are highly focused on a paritcular subject: law, politics,
a specific computer technology, or a particular profession. In fact, there are numerous blogs out there that are
highly focused in discussing .NET.
Below are links to pages that list superior blogs for a given technology.
These hand-picked blogs have a good "interesting posts" to "personal posts" ratio. With these blogs you're much
more likely to find interesting information about .NET
rather than the blogger's review of the latest Holywood flick.
If you have any blogs you'd like to recommend for inclusion in any of these categories, let me know!
One of the neat things about blogs is that they typically provide an RSS syndication feed. RSS is a standard
that spells out a format for syndicated content in an XML format. (For the specifics of the format, see
the RSS 2.0 specification.) There are a number of programs,
called aggregators that are designed specifically to organize syndicated content. Some free aggregators
build using the .NET Framework include SharpReader and
RssBandit.
You can also easily build your own aggregator, as I described in this article:
Creating an Online RSS News Aggregator with ASP.NET.
Too, there are articles here on 4Guys that describe creating and consuming RSS feeds:
This latter article, though, is no longer pertinent, as I've created a custom ASP.NET server control to display an RSS
syndication feed in an ASP.NET Web page. This control is used in the "recommended blogs" pages, and is demonstrated below,
showing the RSS feed from my blog, ScottOnWriting.NET. For more information
on this custom control, check out A Custom ASP.NET Server Control for Displaying RSS Feeds.
If you are interested in starting your own blog site, consider checking out .Text.
It's an open-source product created by Scott Watermasysk. I'm using .Text on
my blog. Too, the ASP.NET blogs at WebLogs.ASP.NET also run on the .Text engine.
Another open-source .NET-based option is to use dasBlog.
Finally, if you do not want to setup a blogging engine on your own computer, you can always use a blog hosting company
like Blogger.
