Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Blogs

Throughout this book, you learned how to craft a Web site using basic site-building ingredients: XHTML, style sheets, and JavaScript. Armed with this know-how, you can build a fairly impressive site.

Maintaining a Web site, however, requires a significant investment of your time. You need to regularly review what you have, add fresh material, keep site navigation menus up to date, check old links, and periodically update your pages to incorporate the latest Web design trends. For some people, this constant grooming is fun—after all, you get to tweak and fiddle with the most minute details of your site until you get everything exactly the way you want it. But not everyone’s that ambitious. Some people prefer to spend less time managing their sites and more time creating content.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about blogs, a self-publishing format that can help you avoid the headaches of Web site management. Blogs are a fresh, straightforward, and slightly chaotic way to communicate on the Web. To maintain a blog, you publish short entries whenever the impulse hits you. Your blog posts are collected, chronologically organized, and presented in Web pages by high-powered blogging software. That means that if you don’t want to fuss with the fine details of Web site management, you don’t need to. All you need to worry about is sending in postings—and with some blogging software, that’s as easy as firing off an email.

In this chapter you’ll learn how blogs work, and you’ll ...