Essential Blogging

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. For each blogging tool you'll learn how to post, edit and delete entries; add pictures; syndicate your stories with RSS; change the appearance of your blog; and manage archives. You'll also learn about the desktop clients that make blogging simple, and get advice and read the stories of real bloggers. Written by prominent bloggers and authors of blogging tools, Essential Blogging is a no-nonsense guide to the technology of blogging.

User review
Helpful for the beginner.
This was a curiosity read. I would consider myself a beginner blogger and found some of the contents to be useful and some of it not.

Overall this book is an introduction for a novice. You get a discussion for blogger, moveable type, radio userland, blogger pro, and a couple I had not heard of called blosxum and blagg.

I read the chapters on blogger, blogger pro and radio userland and found them interesting to a degree. I skimmed the rest.

I found the chapter on tools to be the most valuable as I really don't have any. I am looking into some of them to streamline my blogging efforts.

The final chapter contains quotes from various bloggers. I really don't see the value of it and wonder if it's just space filer.

Overall, this is not a bad book but I don't think it will remain on my shelf after my skills and knowledge improve.

User review
A good guide to some specific software
`Blogging` (the practice of keeping a public on-line journal to record personal thoughts, observations and links), is hot news on the internet these days. Many of the best-known names in the business keep such journals, so it's not surprising that the book publishers want to cash in.

Things in the world of blogging move fast. Minor celebrities rise and fall, new software is continually being released, new jargon is invented. It's hard for a paper book to keep up. There are some aspects of blogging which are gaining some permanancy. Unfortunately, this book only skims those topics, preferring to spend nearly 200 pages describing how to use particular (late 2002) versions of a few blogging tools.

The most incisive and thought-provoking part of the book is the last ten pages - interesting quotes from a range of bloggers. It's the only bit which shows any of the excitement and `buzz` of blogging and gets you wanting to get involved.

This is not a bad book. But it's not really the book described in its own advertsing. If you want a rough guide to comparing, installing and using a small selection of the well-known blog software offerings, this book is right for you. If you want a more thoughtful and detailed overview of what blogging is all about, why you should do it, what the terminology means, or how it works `under the hood`, keep looking.

User review
Not enough code for me
I bought this book hoping for a little more code (html or java) to help me design my own weblog, but it left me hanging. It gives a great description of what a weblog is and how to get it up and running, but lacks in design elements.

User review
Read this before you start blogging
Reading this book before you get started with a blog will save you time, money, and frustration. It will give you a fantastic overview of what is available as far as platforms and tools for blogging. It is not a reference, and it omits a lot of things one may wish to do with their blog. But it will be helpful to the novice. While this is a beginner's book, it is not written at a `Dummy` level, and the typical computer user will be right at home. The only disadvantage of the book is that once you zero in on a particular blog management system (e.g., Blogger) the sections dealing with the other systems are no longer particularly useful.

User review
Poorly Edited, Minorly Informative
The book does say that if you are currently running a blog, a lot of the information contained will not be new, so I understand they are marketing to a newbie crowd. However, even for newbies, I really don't think the information contained therein is very useful. Mostly do to poor editing and layout. For example, in the first chapter they include screen shots to show you what a blog looks like,, seems reasonable enough. However, when the author is talking about including a hyperlink to whatever page his post may be talking about, they give full page wide screenshot of the word `Link`,,. it's just this big empty white space with a tiny word,,. `Link` just floating in the middle of it. Totally unhelpful.