About Blogs...

Overview Marisa thought I should write up a little something for those of you who may not be familiar with blogs, or how they "work." The truth is, there's nothing really fancy or complicated about it: open your web browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox), type in our web address (which is www.chasingdonguri.com), and hit "Enter." That will take you to our mail blog page, where you can read all of our incredibly interesting updates. You will see that each blog "post" has a headline, and a date to the right which indicates when the post was made in Korean time (which is GMT + 9, 14 hours ahead of Central US time). Each blog post also shows a picture of either myself or Marisa under the date, which indicates which of us made the post in question. You can see that this post has my picture displayed, because I posted it.
Photos Anything that we write in terms of updates will be posted to the top of the front page of our blog, so new posts will be readily visible when you come to our webpage. We will also post some pictures on the front page to go with the updates; however, we will not post ALL of our pictures to the front page. If you want to browse through all of our pictures, you will need to click on the "photos" link at the very top of the page (There's a row that says "Blog, Scrapbook, Photos, Videos, About Us" -> click on the "Photos" link). That link will take you to a page which displays all of our photo albums: click on an album, and you can browse through the pictures in that album. So any time we upload new pictures, they will into an album on our photos page. Like with the photos, any videos we take will be present on the "Videos" page, but these will usually be posted to the front page of our blog as well.
Scrapbook The "Scrapbook" link will let you browse through Marisa's scrapbook, as she adds pages to it: currently she doesn't have any scrapbook pages completed, so there is nothing there.
Commenting At the bottom of each blog post there will be a link that says "Add a comment"; clicking on that link will allow you to say something in response to the post, like "really cool post," or "I also like pink giraffes." If someone has already made a comment, the link will say something like "2 comments" -> you can still click on the link to add your own comment.
Getting Email Updates If you would like to be updated by email when we post something new to our blog (so that you don't have to keep coming to the webpage to check), there is a cool service called RSS Forward that will allow you to do just that: simply go to www.rssfwd.com and enter the website address of our blog into the form on the front page, then click "Submit," and follow the instructions to enter your email address. Once you have subscribed to our blog via RSS Forward you will receive any new posts you make in your email inbox. Images and videos will be removed, however, so I recommend visiting our site any time you get an email about an update.
That's It! That's basically it. There are a variety of other little features that you can discover and explore for yourself (or maybe I'll post about some of them later on), but that's it for the basics.
Appendix A: Why Blog? Okay, okay, so some of you may be wondering what all of this hoopla is about: what is it with us young people anyway? Why can't we just send out email updates the old-fashioned way? After all, email was good enough for our grandparents, right? Here are a few of the benefits of blogging, from our perspective:
1. A blog allows us to update everyone at once about our general experience: we can then use email for the personal notes and such.
2. A blog allows information to be better organized and more accessible than email. Fancy things like archiving, tagging, and searching can be implemented easily.
3. A blog allows us to update you with pictures, videos, and scrapbooks, rather than with text alone.
4. A blog allows freedom of choice: if you don't want to be bombarded with what's happening in our lives, you can simply stop visiting the site, rather than having to resort to an embarassing email explaining how you want to be taken off our list because we're boring.
5. A blog allows for a larger audience: should someone outside of our circle of family and friends be searching the internet hoping to find a few stories from people teaching English in Korea, they might be lucky enough to stumble upon our site.
Appendix B: What's With the Name? A couple of you will understand the name, and if you've read Annie Dillard you might get the byline... I'll explain them later on.