Product Description

Turn your home page into a microportal with fresh content that will keep readers coming back. The first hands-on book on building blogs, this is an excellent tutorial for new bloggers, and includes many advanced techniques for veteran bloggers. Simply put, web logging, known as blogging, is an easy way of updating a web page via a browser without the hassle of launching an FTP client or HTML editor. With all the templates, add-ons, and extra features associated with building this microportal, the blog is a new take on the home page. The blog brings the voice of its creator to the surface, builds it into the design, and keeps the content fresh and meaningful. This book features hands-on tutorials for building a blog, adding a user based commenting system, adding team members, syndicating with JavaScript, adding searches to a site, and much more. This is the book for creative web-enthusiasts looking for the "next thing" and it's the first book of new ideas and advanced tutorials for bloggers already numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1090337 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover

Turn your home page into a microportal with fresh content that will keep readers coming back. The first hands-on book on building blogs, this is an excellent tutorial for new bloggers, and includes many advanced techniques for veteran bloggers. Simply put, web logging, known as blogging, is an easy way of updating a web page via a browser without the hassle of launching an FTP client or HTML editor. With all the templates, add-ons, and extra features associated with building this microportal, the blog is a new take on the home page. The blog brings the voice of its creator to the surface, builds it into the design, and keeps the content fresh and meaningful. This book features hands-on tutorials for building a blog, adding a user based commenting system, adding team members, syndicating with JavaScript, adding searches to a site, and much more. This is the book for creative web-enthusiasts looking for the "next thing" and it's the first book of new ideas and advanced tutorials for bloggers already numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

About the Author

Writer and designerBiz Stone made the leap from print to web design in the late '90s. Shortly thereafter, he signed on as creative director of a dot-com startup Xanga.com, which featured web logging and other community tools. Since then, he has become obsessed with personal publishing and all it has to offer. Biz has written dozens of articles about web development for Web Review and Web Techniques, among others. More information about Biz can be found at Bizstone.com.

Customer Reviews

Enthusiastic, but one-sided
This book tries to cover all aspects of blogging, from a bit of history, through creating and managing a small personal journal, to using blog technology as a corporate marketing tool. Along the way it covers an interesting variety of hints, tips and suggestions on how to make a blog look stylish, how to draw more visitors, and so on. It even covers an overview of using and writing blog-related applications and some thoughts about what might come next.

This book does well at communicating the excitement of blogging. If you are not raring to have a go by the end of the book, you're probably not cut out for life on the web. But beware, The world of blogging is astonishingly fast moving and fashion-conscious, so a book such as this can very quickly loose its cutting edge.

The main limitation of this book is the way it concentrates so much on one blogging system (Blogger), and assumes a particular way of working. On the up-side, the system it describes is probably the most popular, but that can so easily change.

If you would like to run a blog using the Blogger software or the Blog*Spot hosting service, and want to really get the most out of it, this is a great book. If you might be interested in other software and approaches, it's less vital, but still contains a lot of useful and interesting material.

A Beginner's Guide
In a fit of enthusiasm I bought this book when it was hyped on Blogger's own blog. I've been around the web for a while so I should have known better and investigated whether it was at the level to suit me before forking out sixteen quid.

This book is for absolute beginners to blogging, to web site design and HTML. The first few chapters offer most basic instruction which can also be found on the blog providers' web sites. The book does concentrate on Blogger and is a kind of offline companion book to their service. Wonder what other blog providers feel about that. The chapter on adding dynamic features to blogs was perhaps of mild interest to me in that it provided some links. The "Genius Tips" were disappointly basic and fewer than promised.

To be honest, most blogs are easy enough to set up without any outside assistance. This book may be useful for those who know nothing about establishing web pages but it's so basic I'm not sure what it does add that a magazine article or blog provider couldn't. Certainly not genius strategies.