March 14, 2006

What's a blog?

As the world has embraced the Internet, and computers have begun showing up everywhere from our desks to dashboards in our cars (and the bridges of our ships!), we've all been hit with a deluge of acronyms and new "made-up" words that can make us feel out of touch. This blog is one of Cruise West's efforts to keep us in touch – but just to be sure we’re all on the same page, here are some answers to common questions.

What are blogs?

Blog is short for “Weblog” and really is just a Web page that is updated periodically.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s the technology that allows headlines and content from blogs to appear in newsreaders and on personal home pages (like My AOL, My Yahoo, Google’s personalized home page and others.)

Why do I care?

Blogs are updated all the time. But how do you know? There are two typical approaches.

One is to visit the Web page of the blog – in our case http://www.cruisewest.com/blog/voyage/ - to see if there’s anything new.

The other is to subscribe in some way to the content, and have it “aggregated” or brought together in an application (of which there are approximately a zillion - I even get headlines via RSS on my home stereo!) Newsreaders have different ways to subscribe to feeds, but we've provided some buttons on the bottom right hand side of our blog page to make it easy to subscribe with a few of the common customized home pages. The RSS button can be dragged into some application-style newsreaders to subscribe. Feel free to leave a comment to this post if you’re happy with the newsreader you’re using. Our guests will appreciate your experience!

Other uses

Live bookmarks in the Firefox browser are a neat feature that makes it simple to see the latest headlines for a blog. Saving a “live bookmark” in Firefox is straightforward – just click the orange radio waves in the address bar and save it like a normal bookmark. You can then see the headlines of the latest articles in your bookmarks or on your links bar. Firefox is a great browser and will open doors to a better web browsing experience.

You're always welcome to get these posts the "old-fashioned" way - sign up to receive them by email. And by all means, please comment on the posts that interest you, by clicking the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.

Mark Belanger is the Technology Program Manager for Cruise West- which means that anytime you see Cruise West represented out on the web or through email, Mark was in some way involved. From time to time, he'll be unraveling the mysteries of the internet and how we use it to enhance our products and services to you.

Posted by Mark on March 14, 2006 3:58 PM

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