With weblogs or "blogs" exploding all over the Web, the only thing lacking for power users and developers is detailed advice on how choose, install, and run blogging software. Written by leading bloggers, Essential Blogging includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of applications such as Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. This book will get you up and blogging in no time.

Anyone can run a blog (an online journal). From personal diaries to political commentary and technology observations, bloggers are making their voices heard around the world. Essential Blogging helps you select the right blogging software for your needs and show how to get your blog up and running. You'll learn the ingredients of a successful blog, and then get detailed installation, configuration and operation instructions for the leading blogging software: Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom.

 After showing you how to acquire, set-up, and run these leading software packages, Essential Blogging takes you through the more advanced features, so that by the time you finish, you'll be up and blogging with the best of them.

Essential Blogging covers:

    * the important components of a blog and a blog post
    * installing and configuring the tools
    * a survey of desktop blogging clients
    * advice and experience from real-world bloggers
    * hosted blogging with Blogger and Blogger Pro
    * desktop blogging with Radio Userland
    * server blogging with Movable Type
    * posting, editing, and deleting blog entries
    * adding pictures to blog entries
    * syndicating your stories with RSS
    * consuming RSS feeds with Radio Userland
    * customizing the appearance of your blog with templates
    * managing and customizing archives of blog entries
    * adding comments to your blog
    * self-hosting your blog vs using a blog-hosting service
    * going under the hood with the Blosxom blogging system

Written by prominent bloggers and authors of blogging tools, Essential Blogging is a no-nonsense guide to the technology of blogging.

Download Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools

Chapter 6, PDF format, 1.7MB, 32Pages.

By Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott, Mena G. Trott
ISBN 10: 0-596-00388-9 | ISBN 13:9780596003883

CHAPTER 6
Advanced Blogger

Blogger’s primary advantage is its simplicity—if you accept the default settings and host on BlogSpot, you can be up and running within five minutes. Once you have your blog, you’ll find it’s just as easy to customize it.

You can begin with any one of the built-in templates, and then you can change the fonts, colors, layout, and order of contents. Also, you can start without technical embellishment and add comments, web statistics, and support for RSS and other specialized XML. If you host your pages, you can integrate your blog into your preferred development environment by converting the standard HTML output of Blogger into your preferred application type, such as ASP or PHP.

In this chapter, we cover some features specific to Blogger Pro. We take a look at some of the most popular customizations for Blogger, including template customization, adding comments, and statistic reporting. In addition, we discuss blog modifications you can make to integrate your blog into an external application environment, as well as generating RSS for participation in aggregation.

Though most of these changes can be applied whether your blog is hosted on BlogSpot or not, the examples are demonstrated with a blog that’s hosted on an individual server. In addition, all the examples are also demonstrated with Blogger Pro. We note any dependencies based on Blogger version location. ...

Visit Essential Blogging O'Reilly Website

About the Author:

Rael Dornfest is a Researcher at the O'Reilly & Associates focusing on technologies just beyond the pale. He assesses, experiments, programs, and writes for the O'Reilly network and O'Reilly publications. Dornfest is Program Chair of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Chair of the RSS-DEV Working Group, and developer of Meerkat: An Open Wire Service. In his copious free time, he develops bits and bobs of Open Source software and maintains his raelity bytes Weblog.

Shelley Powers is an independent contractor, currently living in St. Louis, who specializes in technology architecture and software development. She's authored several computer books, including Developing ASP Components, Unix Power Tools 3rd edition, Essential Blogging, and Practical RDF. In addition, Shelley has also written several articles related primarily to web technology, many for O'Reilly. Shelley's web site network is at http://burningbird.net, and her weblog is Burningbird, at http://weblog.burningbird.net. is a programmer and the co-creator of Movable Type. With Mena Grabowski Trott, he is a partner and co-founder of Six Apart. He develops all of the backend code for Movable Type, contributes regularly to CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), and has written for Perl.com. Benjamin likes cryptography and Serge Gainsbourg, and he dreams about universal wireless, so he can travel in France.

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