Or good afternoon, or good evening or good midnight snack. Such is the joy of blogging that I have no idea when you’re reading this. All I know is you’re reading this.

Welcome to Pen & Links, your guide to the Internet and the unclogger of the tubes. My goal is to bring you news and information in a way you can actually understand. Think of it as my Christmas present to you. Or New Year’s. Or Easter. Or Halloween.

I don’t think my name or photo is actually that visible anywhere, which means you have no idea who I am so it would be rude of me not to introduce myself.

My name is Kyle Buis. I’m a copy editor for the Appeal-Democrat, but that sounds limiting. I also am in charge of our wondrous Gallery page which runs every Saturday on C1 (submit your photos here), I lay out the monthly Plumas Lake Life tabloid and I have M & M’s on my desk.

I also dabble in photography on the side. I’ll touch more on that in a later post – if I remember it – but it does bring me to answering a question that’s probably on the tip of your tongue.

What on god’s green earth is a freaking blog?

There are about 8 million definitions of what a blog is on the Internet, but the easiest thing to remember that it is short for Weblog. It’s a log (some way of keeping track of information) on the Web (the internet). In that log, you can keep track of events, make comments, bring information, or for pro football players to reveal more of themselves than they planned on.

How does discussing your playbook in the nude have anything to do with my photography? For your sake, not the way you’re thinking.

As I said, a blog can be used in many ways. Here, I give you words and links to stories and relatively current events. Over here is my photography where I post a new photo every day from my collection. Over here is an archive of my writings from college (proud graduate of Chico State, one of many on staff at the Appeal-Democrat).

All three are different ways and designs of presenting some kind of information, but they’re all built on the same blogging software.

Now how can you start blogging?

There are services—Blogger, WordPress and TypePad to name a few. Not all of them are free, some of them can be installed on your own Web site. The possibilities are out there so get out and try at least one of them.