Essential Blogging | O'Reilly Media

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Here's a dry definition of a blog:

A blog is a web page that contains brief, discrete hunks of information called posts. These posts are arranged in reverse-chronological order (the most recent posts come first). Each post is uniquely identified by an anchor tag, and it is marked with a permanent link that can be referred to by others who wish to link to it.

That's what a blog is, but not what it's for. A blog is a means of communication, and there are many different types of messages carried by blogs. Some are nothing but pointers to other web sites, while others run long essays; some are personal diaries, others feature technology; some are edited by one person, others by teams.

This chapter is an introduction to the world of blogging. You'll learn key terms such as blog and syndication, see the different types of blog, analyze the ingredients of a blog, and compare and contrast the different ways you can run your own blog. After reading this chapter, you can make an intelligent decision on which blogging system to use and will know which of the later technology-specific chapters are for you.

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the Internet, and new blogs are created every day. Originally, they were known as weblogs, a term coined by Jorn Barger. The word implies that it might be a record of where some editor has been that day and what she has seen along the way. Now they're blogs (as in "we blog"), a term coined in jest by Peter Merholz (http://www.peterme.com), and contain everything from political commentary to private journals.

The word blog is also a verb meaning to maintain a blog ("Yah, I blog from time to time.") or to post something to a blog ("Oh, that is so cool, I'm gonna blog it as soon as I get home."). Most people use software to automate the maintenance of their blogs, rather than edit the raw HTML themselves. Chapter 2 through Chapter 9 explore some of the most popular blogging tools.

Short answer: yes. There are bloggers of all types, equipped with all levels of technical skill. From Octavia Philips's personal blog at

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There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the Internet, and new blogs are created every day. Originally, they were known as weblogs, a term coined by Jorn Barger. The word implies that it might be a record of where some editor has been that day and what she has seen along the way. Now they're blogs (as in "we blog"), a term coined in jest by Peter Merholz (http://www.peterme.com), and contain everything from political commentary to private journals.

The word blog is also a verb meaning to maintain a blog ("Yah, I blog from time to time.") or to post something to a blog ("Oh, that is so cool, I'm gonna blog it as soon as I get home."). Most people use software to automate the maintenance of their blogs, rather than edit the raw HTML themselves. Chapter 2 through Chapter 9 explore some of the most popular blogging tools.

Short answer: yes. There are bloggers of all types, equipped with all levels of technical skill. From Octavia Philips's personal blog at http://www.tavie.com to Charlie Stross's auctorial blog at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi, bloggers approach their sites with as much variety and passion as the general Net public approaches the Web itself.

Creating a taxonomy of the blogiverse is a fruitless task. There's no good, central directory of blogs that puts each one in its own pigeonhole, because even the most topical blogger will stray from the subject from time to time to celebrate some personal victory or warn his readers off a terrible movie.

Blogs are rich tapestries of something-or-other, mind-croggling crazy quilts of opinion, fact, community, humor, bile, and lust.

Cult figures such as Neil Gaiman, an award-winning writer best known for the Sandman comics (http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp), and Wil Wheaton, geek hero best known for his role as Ensign Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation (http://www.wilwheaton.net), blog, holding forth on the subjects that have wandered over their personal and creative transoms that day.

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Figure 1-1 shows Kottke.org, while Figure 1-2 shows Calamondin (http://www.calamondin.com).

Figure 1-1: Kottke.org

Figure 1-2: Calamondin

Figure 1-3 shows Camworld (http://www.camworld.com).

Figure 1-3: Camworld

Figures Figure 1-1, Figure 1-2, and Figure 1-3 are all distinctive in look and content, but they share a similar structure. A title, a logo, suggested links, and a list of current entries are all standard components of a modern blog.

Here and in the next section, we'll look at these elements, drawing our examples from Boing Boing (Figure 1-4).

Figure 1-4: Boing Boing

Titles are pretty self-explanatory. As with any project name, your blog's title should be easy to remember, catchy, easy to spell, and distinctive. My favorite blog title of all time is "Insolvent Republic of Blogistan" (http://slotman.blogspot.com). A good, distinctive title helps people find your blog easily on Google if they lose the address (so think twice before naming your blog after the English rock band "The The").

A subtitle is an opportunity to further explain the raison d'etre of your blog or to indulge in a bit of wit. Here are some examples:

Kottke.org (http://www.kottke.org): "Home of Fine Hypertext Products"
Electrolite (http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/

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The blog post is the atomic unit of a blog. Blogs are made of successive postings. Some blogs are updated only once a week, others get updated 30 or more times per day (the record for Boing Boing is 27 posts in one day).

Everything about a blog post is optional. There are no rules for blogging. That said, Figure 1-10 shows what a post on Boing Boing looks like. Many weblogs follow a similar format. Some of the salient features of that post follow.

Figure 1-10: A sample post from Boing Boing

A post's title (see Figure 1-11) serves much the same role as a newspaper headline: to sum up the post in a few words that are meant to intrigue the reader and highlight some aspect of the story. A title visually separates your posting from the one above it. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen, in his essay on "Microcontent" (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html), warns headline writers to be aware that headlines are often viewed out of context, on search-engine result pages, in alphabetical listings (he advises leaving off leading "The"s and "A"s for this reason), and as subject-headers for email and titles for web pages.

Figure 1-11: The post title

As you'll see later, titles are also used when blogs are syndicated using a technology called RSS, in which they may appear in a list of hundreds or even thousands of other blog headlines. The point is that your title should be separable from the posting below it — informative even when taken out of context.

There are, of course, copyright issues when posting an image to your blog such as the one in Figure 1-12, and technically it can be a little harder to post an image than it is post plain text (though increasingly blogging engines make this simpler). Here are some tips for posting images:

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Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a data format that allows computers to exchange files containing summaries of stories. Each story typically has a title, location, and possibly a brief synopsis. RSS is extremely simple, and is expressed using standards-defined Extensible Markup Language (XML). Thousands of blogs and other web sites all over the Net produce RSS files describing their content.

The cool thing about RSS is that it's easy to write a program to produce or manipulate the data in an RSS document. RSS is so simple to generate and manipulate that hundreds of programmers have written tools to exploit the thousands of RSS feeds on the Internet.

For example, the Mac OS X toolbar application called MacReporter (http://inferiis.com/products/macreporter/) can regularly fetch headlines from news sites and blogs. You can then scan the headlines looking for interesting news to blog or simply read. Meerkat (http://meerkat.oreillynet.com) is an excellent web-based RSS reader that allows you to filter the feeds you receive by keyword, time, and origin.

Some bloggers have coded custom RSS tools that integrate tightly with their blogs, so that filtered headlines from other sites appear in sidebars on their front pages.

Dave Winer's Weblogs.com is a list of blogs that have sent an "updated" notice over the Internet to the service. If you're looking for a list of recently updated weblogs, you can visit http://www.weblogs.com and browse the list; but if you're a programmer, you can fetch the Weblogs.com RSS feed and get an easy-to-manipulate list of recently updated sites to feed to a search engine or RSS reader.

RSS is a powerful way of spreading your blog entries far and wide.

Some blogging tools, such as Radio and Movable Type, publish RSS feeds by default. Others have options to enable feeds. If your blogging tool doesn't generate its own feed, you can still publish blogs by using Julian Bond's RSSify tool at

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While it's possible to generate and maintain a blog by writing and updating each page by hand, you'd have to be a masochist to do so. The remainder of this book is devoted to several tools that automate the administrivia of blogging: Blogger, Radio UserLand, Movable Type, and Blosxom.

This isn't the full spectrum of blogging tools — products such as Greymatter, Manila, LiveJournal, and others all have strong user bases. The tools we've chosen to cover in-depth, though, represent various niches in the blogging spectrum — some are for gurus, some are for novices; some require you to install software on your PC, some can be run completely from afar; some work with your own domain, others host your blog for you; and so on.

This section discusses the features of several blog management systems, not just the ones we describe in detail in the book. Table 1-1 lists the systems covered in this section and their URLs.

After reading this section, you can make an informed decision about which tool is right for you.

Table 1-1: Blog management systems
System	Home page
Blogger	`http://www.blogger.com/`
Blogger Pro	`http://pro.blogger.com/`
Blosxom	`http://www.raelity.org/lang/perl/blosxom/`
Greymatter

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As we saw in Chapter 1, most blog systems provide web-based interfaces. Browser text fields, though, are primitive, constrictive, and awkward to use. It's very easy to accidentally delete a post you're working on, and there are no autosave or "Are you sure you want to lose this message?" prompts.

Desktop clients are a more convenient way to blog. A desktop client is an application that runs on your desktop PC and communicates with a blogging system using a protocol called the Blogger API. Many blog systems understand the Blogger API, including Blogger, Radio UserLand, and Movable Type.

The typical desktop client features a text editing window with buttons to add images, mark sections as bold or italic, create headings, etc. Most support two commands: Post, which sends the post to your blogging system but doesn't make it appear on your blog; and Publish, which sends the post and makes it visible on your blog.

This chapter provides a quick survey of six popular blogging applications that make use of the Blogger API. While they do vary in completeness, compliance, and usability, they're all simple to install, configure, and use; you should make use of the same handful of settings and sport a range of features designed to take your blogging experience beyond that cramped browser window and into an environment better suited to writing.

While each sports its own particular preferences, all the Blogger API-based applications hold certain API-specific settings in common, usually:

Username: The username with which you identify yourself to your blogging system.
Password: The password associated with your username.
XML-RPC URL: The URL of your blog system's Blogger API interface (the default is often Blogger's http://plant.blogger.com/api/RPC2/

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While each sports its own particular preferences, all the Blogger API-based applications hold certain API-specific settings in common, usually:

Username: The username with which you identify yourself to your blogging system.
Password: The password associated with your username.
XML-RPC URL: The URL of your blog system's Blogger API interface (the default is often Blogger's http://plant.blogger.com/api/RPC2/). Sometimes this is broken up into Server and Path settings (e.g., Server http://plant.blogger.com, Path /api/RPC2/).
Weblog ID: Many blog systems support multiple weblogs — for example, with only one installation of Movable Type, you can publish as many different weblogs as you like. Some desktop clients understand the concept of multiple weblogs and will let you select the blog to which a particular post is to go. Others require you to hardcode the ID of a particular blog. A Blogger ID is a string, such as myblog, while Movable Type uses numerical IDs.

Figure 2-1 shows a fairly representative configuration panel. Beyond these standard options are features such as Ping Weblogs.com, which notifies http://www.weblogs.com each time you post a new story. Check the desktop client's documentation for details of such features.

Figure 2-1: BlogApp's fairly representative configuration panel

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BlogScript by WebEntourage (http://www.webentourage.com) is a free AppleScript script for Mac OS X that simply posts the contents of the clipboard to a weblog via a single menu selection. The obvious advantage is the ability to write in any environment you choose, by copying the text you wish to blog and activating BlogScript when you're ready to post (see Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2: Running BlogScript from the Mac OS X Script menu

Given its focus on simply being a copy-to-blog function, BlogScript is understandably rather sparse. The only additional feature it offers is the option to ping weblogs.com. You can copy and modify the AppleScript to manage multiple accounts and weblogs.

Figure 2-3 shows BlogScript in action, posting a line of text copied to the clipboard from Mac OS X's TextEdit (the window in the background).

Figure 2-3: Running BlogScript from the Mac OS X Script menu

Installation is a snap; simply drop the script into your Scripts folder, and it'll be available from your toolbar Script menu. The only prerequisite is Script menu for OS X 10.1, available for free download at http://www.apple.com/applescript/macosx/script_menu/.

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Also from WebEntourage is BlogApp, a $6 shareware Mac OS X application that offers a rudimentary drag-and-drop text editor with bold, italic, and hyperlink buttons (see Figure 2-4), as-you-type spell-checking, the ability to maintain multiple weblogs and weblog entries, and template maintenance functions: Store Post, Edit Last Post, Edit or Delete Recent Post, Edit Main Template, and Edit Archive Template.

Figure 2-4: BlogApp and resulting Blogger weblog entry (browser window in the background)

BlogApp requires Mac OS X, Version 10.1.2 or higher. Downloadable as a compressed disk image, installation is just a matter of decompressing and mounting the image and copying the application to your Applications folder.

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blogBuddy (http://blogbuddy.sourceforge.net) is the Windows (95/NT/ME/2000/XP) equivalent of BlogApp, providing a basic text editor with bold, italic, underline, and hyperlink buttons (see Figure 2-5), web service-based spell checking (meaning you don't need to install a big dictionary), support for multiple weblogs (but not multiple accounts), and the ability to edit previous posts and main and archive templates.

Figure 2-5: blogBuddy and resulting Blogger weblog entry (browser window in the background)

blogBuddy is open source software, distributed under the GNU Public License, downloadable as both a self-installing executable and a ZIP archive.

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The most featureful desktop client is w.bloggar (http://www.wbloggar.com/) for Windows. It sports a colorized HTML editor (including tables and images) with text formatting (bold, italic, font, color, size, alignment, and so forth), an integrated preview window, and everything else one would expect to find under the File and Edit menus. Toolbar drop-down lists provide instant access to previous posts and main and archive templates. Figure 2-6 shows w.bloggar in action.

Figure 2-6: w.bloggar showing off its HTML editor with the resulting nicely formatted weblog entry in the background

w.bloggar supports not only multiple weblogs associated with a particular account, but multiple accounts across weblog systems and services; simply choose Select Account and you're posting elsewhere. And w.blogger allows you to post a particular weblog entry to multiple weblogs simultaneously — associated with a single account, mind you.

w.blogger is freeware, downloadable as a self-extracting installer. It requires Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer.

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Slug (http://www.3e.org/slug/) is designed to work specifically with Movable Type via the Blogger API, UserLand's proposed MetaWeblogAPI (a more generalized and extensible API based on Blogger's), and some API calls specific to Movable Type. Other than the addition of Movable Type's categories, Slug is rather rudimentary and reminiscent of BlogApp for Mac OS X and blogBuddy for Windows. Figure 2-7 shows Slug.

Figure 2-7: Slug's support for Movable Type categories; the resulting entry appears underneath in Movable Type's usual browser-based interface

Slug comes as a self-installing Windows .msi application with included source code. It does require the installation of the Microsoft .NET Framework, a separate 19-megabyte download.

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Radio UserLand can be used to post to another blog system (e.g., Movable Type or Blogger). The experimental Manila-Blogger Bridge Tool lets you mirror Radio UserLand blog posts via the Blogger API. Detailed instructions are available from http://radio.userland.com/manilaBloggerBridgeTool/.

Figure 2-8: Manila-Blogger Bridge configuration

Figure 2-8 shows the configuration screen for the Manila-Blogger Bridge. As you can see, it takes the same parameters as the other tools.

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The most commonly used blogging tool is Blogger. It requires the least amount of commitment in time or resources, allowing you to go from wanting a blog to having one in about five minutes and at no cost. This simplicity, ease of access, and no-risk aspect of Blogger is the reason many people have started blogging.

The Blogger software is the property of Pyra Labs (http://www.pyra.com), a company headed by Evan Williams (known as "Ev" within the blogging community). Blogger is often credited as the reason for the explosion of blogging that's occurred in the last couple of years.

While it is incredibly easy to use, Blogger's popularity can lead to unexpected results at times, such as postings that are lost during the publication process, archives that go missing, and server errors when accessing Blogger or your blog on BlogSpot. Throughout this chapter, we'll point out the problems that exist at the time of this printing and suggest ways to lessen or resolve these problems. Pyra is aware of all these problems and is working on fixing them.

Regardless of the occasionally unreliable nature of Blogger, it's a great tool to use to get your blogging feet wet. This chapter provides an overview of Blogger, from signing up for an account to creating your first blog. It also looks at the features built into the standard version of Blogger. The enhancements available in the subscription Blogger Pro service are discussed in Chapter 6.

Blogger is a web-based tool, requiring no installation of software on your personal computer or on your server if you happen to already have a web site. You access the tool through the Blogger web site (located at http://blogger.com), and the blog pages are posted to your web site or to Pyra's BlogSpot (http://blogspot.com) community blog server.

Architecturally, your template, archival information, and blog content are stored in databases at Pyra. It's only the generated main blog page, associated supporting files such as images, and archive files that get stored on the blog server. Figure 3-1 shows this.

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Blogger is a web-based tool, requiring no installation of software on your personal computer or on your server if you happen to already have a web site. You access the tool through the Blogger web site (located at http://blogger.com), and the blog pages are posted to your web site or to Pyra's BlogSpot (http://blogspot.com) community blog server.

Architecturally, your template, archival information, and blog content are stored in databases at Pyra. It's only the generated main blog page, associated supporting files such as images, and archive files that get stored on the blog server. Figure 3-1 shows this.

Figure 3-1: Posting a blog

While most people interact with Blogger through the web interface, it's not the only way. You can also use a desktop client from Chapter 2 to maintain your blog. In Chapter 6, you'll learn about Blogger Pro's blog-by-email service.

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To use Blogger, all you need is a browser that Blogger supports. The standard version of Blogger works with most major browsers including Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla. Until recently, browser support for Blogger Pro was limited to Internet Explorer, which meant Blogger wasn't accessible from a Linux or other Unix-based box. However, Blogger support has been added to Mozilla Release Candidate 1.0 and up, which means you can now manage your Blogger account from Linux and other non-Windows environments.

You can work around the browser completely by using the Blogger API. Once you've created the initial account and blog, post and maintain it via XML-RPC, using one of the client-side tools describe in Chapter 2.

You don't need to have a web site or a preregistered domain name to create a Blogger blog. You can use Pyra's community blog server, BlogSpot, to host your blog pages. However, if you want to host your own pages, you'll need a web site that allows FTP posting of content. It doesn't matter whether it's a Unix or Windows server, but it must have FTP access.

Other than these two very minimal requirements, there are no technical restrictions to running a Blogger blog. If you meet the minimum requirements, you're ready to create your first Blogger blog.

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The best demonstration of the simplicity and ease of use of Blogger is to create a Blogger account, then create your first blog — a process that takes five minutes from start to finish.

To set up a Blogger account, access the main Blogger web site at http://blogger.com. In the page that opens, there's a box in the center titled "Create your own Blog" and a button labeled Start Now!. Click the button to go to the signup page, shown in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2: Blogger account sign-up page

Enter your preferred username and password, your name and email address, and your organization, if any. Don't reuse a password from another system you have access too — the web traffic between you and Blogger is not encrypted, and your password may be emailed to you in plain text. By picking a unique password, you ensure that a malicious packet sniffer can gain access only to your Blogger account and not your email, ISP account, etc.

If you don't see the Start Now! button on the Blogger main page, look for a form with the words "If you don't have a blogger account, sign up!". In the form, type in your Blogger username and password. When you submit the form, you are taken to a second page to type in the rest of the account information.

You only have to create a Blogger account once; you can use the one account to create many different blogs.

Once you have your Blogger account, you can log into your account and begin using the blogging tool by going to the Blogger main page and entering your username and password. At this point, you can also check the option box labeled "Remember me?" to have the web site remember your login information and log you in automatically every time you access Blogger.

Once logged in, click on the link labeled Create a New Blog, listed on the front page. In the page that opens, provide a title and description. As you'll see later in this chapter, this information can be printed on your blog page if you so choose. For the demonstration blog, we'll use "O'Reilly's Weblogging" as the title, and the following for the description:

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In the previous section, you created a blog and made your first posting, accepting the default behavior of Blogger. However, over time you'll most likely want to customize the blog to provide a look and feel uniquely your own. The first step in customizing your blog is understanding the components of a Blogger blog and how to adjust the settings related to each of them.

Figure 3-5 shows the blog description at the top of the lefthand column and the title in large type across the top of the page.

To change the title, return to the Blogger Edit view page and select the Settings option from the toolbar at the top of the web page. This opens a page that allows you to change various settings of your blog, as shown in Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6: Changing the blog title in Blogger Settings

You can change the title in the first field, as we did for the example. You can also edit or remove the description in this Settings page. For the example, we'll leave the description as is.

Change the URL field to specify your blog's subdomain on blogspot.com. For example, Figure 3-6 shows a URL of "oreilly," so the blog is visible at http://oreilly.blogspot.com. Blogspot will give you an error if you try to set the URL field to something that's reserved or already taken(e.g., "www").

Once you've made the changes, save them by clicking the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page. Be careful with this button — right next to it is one that will delete the blog!

After saving the changes, you're returned to the Edit view page. To promote the changes you made to your displayed blog, click the Publish button that shows above the calendar in the bottom half of the page. View the blog again to see the new title on the page.

As described in Chapter 1, blog postings are commonly date- and timestamped and displayed in reverse chronological order (latest at the top of the page).

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Your first blog posting was small and without a lot of embellishment. For the most part, though, your postings can be larger, and may feature hypertext links to other web pages or embedded graphics and other media. In addition, you can use HTML formatting to make certain aspects of your content stand out, such as with bolding or italicizing, or indenting text you've pulled as a quote.

Once you've created a post, you might need to modify it, adding new information or perhaps correcting existing information (or to correct typos, an all too frequent occurrence in blogs). In addition, you might regret a posting and choose to delete the whole thing.

All these blog posting management tasks — adding, modifying, and deleting — are performed through the Blogger Edit view page.

If you're creating an extensive or long post, or making significant modifications, we strongly recommend that you do this work in an offline text tool, such as Notepad, and then copy and paste the text into the Blogger edit window. If problems arise during posting, you won't lose your work and can resubmit your post safely a second time. Alternatively, use one of these desktop clients mentioned from Chapter 2.

Line breaks in the posting are reflected in the generated HTML by default. As an example, two break tag entries (<BR>) are added when you hit the Enter key twice in your content. Unless you want to add these tags manually, leave the line break conversion setting as is.

Though line breaks are managed for you, any other use of specialized HTML formatting must be added to your content manually. Thankfully, there are Blogger buttons that handle some of this for you. The formatting buttons do not display when you use Mozilla. They display only within Internet Explorer at the time of this writing.

For example, you might want to italicize text in your posting for emphasis. You can do this in Blogger by embedding italic (

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When you added, modified, or deleted a posting in the last section, the modifications were applied to the associated archive file, as well as the main blog page. Not all changes are reflected this way — if you customize the template or choose a new default template, you have to republish the archive pages to pick up this change.

To generate new archive files due to a change in the template, click on the Archive button on the Blogger toolbar. The Blogger Archive view page opens, listing each archive file with icons next to it to republish or delete the specific archive file. Because you've just started your blog, only one archive file is present, as shown in Figure 3-10.

Figure 3-10: Blogger Archive view

To republish one specific archive, just click the small recycle button next to the archive filename. When you do, a page opens providing the status of the republication process. When finished, this window closes and the new date and time the archive was republished is shown in the Last Saved column.

Note that occasionally, a blog error page appears instead of a status page. This usually means the Blogger system is under a great load at the time. Wait about an hour and then republishing the archive file again — this time you should be able to see the status page.

If you have more than one archive file, you can click the Republish All button. This forces a republication of all archive files, disseminating any template change throughout all the archives.

Over time, you might decide not to keep a reference to an older archive. To remove this reference, click the delete icon next to it. You still need to physically remove the file if you host your own blog.

The Archive view page is changing. At the time of this writing, archive handling was being modified, and individual archives are no longer accessible.

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Over time you might need to change your email address or want to change your username. In addition, for security reasons, you should consider changing your password every three months or so. All this information is kept in your account profile.

To modify your basic account profile information, click on the Team button in the Blogger toolbar, and in the page that opens, click on your name. Another page opens listing Organization, URL, Time Zone, and other information. In the right side of the toolbar is a link labeled Edit My Profile; follow this link.

The user account profile page is shown in Figure 3-11. This page is where you can modify your username, email, personal URL, and so on. In particular, this is where you can change your password. Once you've made your modifications, click the Save Profile button to commit the changes.

Figure 3-11: Changing your account profile

Change your password frequently, and use a combination of characters — alphabetical, numerical, and other. In addition, you'll want to use a username that's not that easy to guess. For instance, don't use the name of your blog or other publicly known information.

In the Profile page, you can also set what information is hidden from people who aren't part of your blogging team. (See Section 3.12 later in this chapter for more on this.)

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The most important aspect of your blog is the writing. However, the overall appearance of the blog can affect how people perceive the writing. If the blog has a bright, cheerful, and silly appearance, but the writing is somber and very serious, the mixed messages can jar your readers.

Additionally, blog formatting can adversely impact people's ability to read the writing. If the font is small and light-colored against a white background, your readers might have a hard time making out the words.

The current style on the Essentials blog, Chroma, is one of the most popularly used, primarily because the words are very legible and its neutral format fits most writing and content styles. However, it's fun and interesting to try new looks.

When you created your blog, you picked a default template. You might be happy with it, or you might be regretting your choice about now. Regardless, changing the default template is easy within Blogger.

To change the existing template, click the Template button on the Blogger toolbar. When the Template view page opens, a large text box at the top shows the existing template HTML, including the embedded Blogger tags (to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6). When you pick a new Blogger template, you lose everything in this block — including any additions and modifications you may have added. If you've customized the template, make a backup of the existing template first. Then you can work on incorporating your modifications into the new template. (Backing up your template is as easy as selecting all the text in the textbox, clicking the Copy button in the Browser Edit menu, and then pasting the contents into your favorite text editing tool, such as Notepad.)

To change the existing template, click the link labeled Choose a New Template. In the page that opens, you'll see several different template formats from which to choose, including the one you currently have.

Before selecting a new template, think about the layout you prefer for your blog. Background colors, images, and font styles are easy to change, but page layout can be complex, particularly when you have to work around the necessary Blogger template tags. As a general rule, pick a blog that has the layout that you want and finetune the selection with color and style.

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Where you locate your blog can impact what you can do with it. If you host your blog on something such as BlogSpot, you can only host your web pages on this site, not additional files, such as graphics or other media files. However, hosting your own web site for your blogs isn't always a trivial exercise.

BlogSpot (www.blogspot.com) is a handy place to park your blog when first starting out. The cost is very cheap — $12/year to eliminate the ad if it bothers you (it will!). No maintenance, no hassles with working things out with an ISP, and so on. However, there are two primary disadvantages to hosting your blog on BlogSpot.

The first is, as stated earlier, you can't load other files on to the server or run other technologies such as PHP or ASP. You can work around this limitation, somewhat, by hosting your graphics at a free web server, such as freeservers.com. In addition, other bloggers are usually willing to give up some space for graphics, though, you may have to work through them to get the graphics uploaded. Unfortunately, this won't help if you want to use server-side technologies such as PHP. For this, you'll have to self-host.

The second reason not to use BlogSpot is that it is, at times, an extremely overworked server, leading to slow page loads and occasional server failures. The subscription-based Blogger Pro gets you access to faster and more reliable servers, however.

You will almost definitely need a subscription ISP service to run your own blog. Many free web sites, such as GeoCities, won't allow you to FTP pages from Blogger.

To self-host your Blogger-generated pages, you need a web account with an ISP that provides FTP access. We're not aware of any ISP that doesn't provide this, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding one. The only decisions that exist, then, are what environment you want (Windows or Unix), web server (such as IIS or Apache), and the cost. Because you don't have any requirements for specialized technology — you only need the ability to host HTML pages — you don't have to sign up for an account that provides specialized application support.

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Blogger has a shortcut that allows you to easily select text from another web page and post the selected text as an attributed and linked post to your blog. The feature is called BlogThis!.

BlogThis! gives you the ability to go to any web site — not just another blog — select some text and then click a link that'll open a Blogger window that includes the highlighted text and a hypertext reference to the page. You can edit the text as much as you want. When you're finished, click a button and the material is then posted to your blog with no other required effort. This is particularly handy if you quote and reference material in other blogs. No more having to select, copy, paste, and create a link when you want to quote another blogger.

To enable BlogThis!, access the Settings view and scroll down to the bottom of the page. There are two links in the page, each corresponding to a different way to get BlogThis! functionality. One link points to a registry file that can be downloaded and then run against your registry. The second link adds BlogThis!, manually, as a link to your Favorites menu.

To update the registry, right-click on the registry file link and select the Install BlogThis! option. A window opens providing some feedback. Click OK to open another window to download the file or run it from the current location — choose the option to save the registry file to your drive. Once the file is downloaded, open the file. When prompted to update the registry, specify Yes to update the Registry.

In theory, you can now select text and right-click on it to get a menu that lets you create a new blog entry from the selected text. Unfortunately at the time of this writing, the registry version of BlogThis! is problematical with IE 6.0, even with published workarounds. Hopefully BlogThis! will be fixed by the time you read this. In the meantime, you can use the second approach, which is to add a link to the BlogThis! functionality in your toolbar.

To manually add BlogThis! to your browser toolbar, go to Blogger help at

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Up until now, you haven't been promoting your blog to the public as you've been trying out new features. When you're to the point where you want to attract visitors to your blog, you'll introduce your blog to the world, inviting people to stop by and read what you have to say. In the blogging community, this is known as generating buzz.

The first step to promoting your blog is to change the settings from being a non-public blog to a public one. This is accomplished through the Blogger Settings view, by changing the drop-down menu value of No for the field labeled Public Blog to Yes. Once you've done this, this adds your blog to the blog verification process — Pyra reviews the entry to ensure that it doesn't violate the TOS. Once verified, your blog is then added to the Blogger Directory. It also shows up on the Blogger web site when you make blog updates (though only briefly, and only if your update is within the time frame of the current view on Blogger).

The second step is Ping Weblogs.com whenever you make a change to your blog. You can do this through various automated approaches, outside of the scope of this book. Or you can do this manually, through the Weblogs.com update notification form at http://newhome.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm. In this form, type in the name of your blog (keep it short) and your blog URL. For the demonstration blog we've built so far, the values would be:

Essential Blogger
essentials.burningbird.net

This adds the update to the Weblogs.com queue, and your blog will show — within a minute or two — on the Weblogs.com page. By adding your update notifications to Weblogs.com, you're also "adding" it indirectly to several other resources that use Weblogs.com as feeds to their own notification systems.

If you're a Blogger Pro user, there's a checkbox in the Settings view, in Publishing, that you can check. This makes edits to your blog automatically update Weblogs.com.

The third step to promoting your blog is to add it to Blogdex and Daypop. They are services that scan blogs to see what people are pointing to. See

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In addition to maintaining a Blogger blog for your own personal use, you can also create a group blog and then invite people to participate.

As you are the owner of the blog, you'll be the designated administrator and the only person who can add or remove other blog team members. To add a new member, click the Team button on the Blogger toolbar. In the window that opens, you should be the only person listed as a team member at this time, with a check underneath the column heading labeled Admin.

To add a new member, click the Add New Member(s) button on the toolbar. In the window that opens, there are a couple of boxes, including one with a list of Available Users, one for team members being added, and form fields to add a member who isn't in the list of Available Users. The Available Users list is made up of people who are team members of other group blogs to which you belong.

Figure 3-18 shows an invitation. The message that goes with the emailed invitation explains what's going on. Click the New >> button to add the invitee to the list.

Figure 3-18: Inviting new team members to a group blog

Repeating this process adds yet more invitees to the list. When finished, click the Send Invite(s) button to send the invitation. This returns you to the Team view, where you'll find that the invitee has been added to the page, with a status of pending until they either accept or decline the invitation.

The invitee receives an email with a subject line of "Blogger blog invitation from your name". The invitation includes a link to accept or decline the invitation, and instructions how to process the invitation whether they're a current Blogger user or not. Clicking the link then takes the invitee to a page where they can accept or decline the invitation.

Invited team members do not have all the options on the Blogger toolbar that the blog administrator has. For instance, a team member will not see the Settings, Template, and Archive buttons as they won't be able to adjust any of global settings of the blog; they can only add, modify, and delete their own postings.

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The procedure to remove a Blogger blog differs based on whether the blog is hosted on BlogSpot or your own server. If hosted on your own server, you can manually delete the blogging pages and then delete the Blogger blog.

Until recently, if your blog was hosted on BlogSpot, you had to manipulate the Blogger template to remove the files. However, with recent changes, deleting the Blogger blog also deletes the pages on BlogSpot.

To delete a Blogger blog, access the Settings view, scroll down to the bottom and click the Delete this Blog button. You are then asked to confirm your decision. Once you do, the blog is removed from Blogger's data stores, and blog pages are removed from BlogSpot. If you hosted the blog on your server, you must manually remove the pages.

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