Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content (VOICES) by Biz Stone

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: #392722 in Books
Published on: 2002-09-21
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
336 pages
Editorial Reviews

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

simple usage
Stone takes us on a tour of what is available for you to start and run your own blog website. A lot of it is surprisingly easy to master. Many content management packages have been written specifically for blogging, and come free or cheap.

He also offers suggestions about financing your site with ads; perhaps using Google. Plus ways to publicise your content. Notably by using RSS so that others coming to your site can readily subscribe. He does not go into the full details of RSS. You need a more technical text for that. But the example RSS file given here is simple enough to convey the essence of what is involved.

Unfortunately, he does not discuss blog spam. Where a spammer or a bot might write spam articles on your site. On some large blog sites, this has emerged as a problem, as spammers try to manipulate search engines to up the rankings of the spam sites.

Showing its age but still very relevant.
Even though this book is showing it's age, like in the prices for some of the software, it is still a very good primer for getting to know Blogging. It is complete with basic HTML advise and good reviews on software. It also has good advice on layout and making a Blog look good and readable.

Blogging Incomplete
The range of products reviewed is impressive; however, the information on each of the products is incomplete. For example, Xanga is mentioned to have a comfy community, but no where is it mentioned that with Xanga it is impossible to get outside of their community. And the Xanga community consists of hundreds of thousands of tweens who want to know whether or not Bobby really ate a worm. Not for serious bloggers. It seems designed for and catering to Junior High School aged kids.