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About Blogging at Baruch College

The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute supports the use of the Wordpress MultiUser blogging package at Baruch College. This package makes possible the central administration of unlimited number of Wordpress blogs, which members of the Baruch College community can maintain and customize to their liking through Blogs@Baruch.

Currently, support of Wordpress blogs by the Schwartz Communication Institute is limited to faculty members who are using blogs in their courses or for administrative purposes, and students who will be maintaining their own blogs in conjunction with a particular course.

Why Blog?

Blogging is a powerful tool for members of a college community to communicate with one another, and also beyond the boundaries of the campus. Blogs can be used by faculty members in teaching their courses, by students to produce, disseminate, and compile their work, and by administrators interested in providing resources to and communicating with members of the college community.

Why Wordpress?

Wordpress is the most robust, flexible, and user-friendly blogging package available. It's also a free, open source application, and deploying it ties Baruch bloggers into a broad, international community of users who are thinking about and experimenting around the implications of new technology on the way we communicate and interact with the world around us.

Anatomy and Vocabulary of a Weblog

Inspired by this Wiki page (which was inspired by this blog post, below you'll find a diagram that lays out the basic terminology for the contents of a weblog.

What you see above is the front end of the Institute's weblog, Cac.ophony.org. Weblogs have front ends, which display on the web, and back ends or administrative areas, which require logging in. Blogs are administered via their back end.

Writing on a weblog appears in three primary locations:

• Posts are individual items or articles on front end of the blog that display in reverse chronological order; the most recent Post is always at the top of the blog. Posts are written in the back end by individual authors
• Comments are wedded to each Post, and allow for discussion of the content of that Post. Comments can be written by clicking on the comments link of an individual blog post on the front end. Comments can be edited or deleted by the blog administrator via the back end of the blog
• Pages act like individual Posts, but are static and live outside of the chronology of the blog. They are accessible via links in the sidebar and/or tabs at the top of the page, and are created in the back end of the blog