A “blog” is a Web page containing a series of short, chronologically ordered posts. From this simple, diary-like start, an enormous phenomenon has evolved. The key to this phenomenon has been in the tools that allow simple updating of the site. Editing a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) page and transferring it to a Web site via file transfer protocol (FTP) is not difficult in itself, but if the same actions can be performed almost instantaneously with a click of a button, it is likely that the Web site in question will be updated much more often. “Blog,” derived from “Weblog,” is now a verb, describing the activity of updating such sites.
This book is aimed at anyone who is interested in setting up and running their own blog. The authors choose four popular tools for blogs, and describe each: Blogger, Radio UserLand, Movable Type, and Blosxom. While there are many other tools available, these were chosen because they are good examples of the various different approaches to blogging. Blogger is a centrally-hosted, Web-based tool that interacts with a Web site via FTP; Radio UserLand is a piece of desktop software; Movable Type is an application that is installed on individual servers; and Blosxom is a simple, no-frills script that consists of 61 lines of Perl code, substituting the user’s favorite text editor for a user interface.
The book consists of ten chapters, which are each self-contained, so the book does not have to be read sequentially. The first chapter is an introduction to blogging, written by the co-editor of a popular blog. This offers a snapshot of the many things that people choose to write about in blogs; common components, such as titles, timestamps, and permanent links; and blog etiquette, including crediting the source of an interesting link. This chapter also takes a non-technical look at the pros and cons of each of the systems discussed in the book.
Chapter 2, “Desktop Clients,” is one of the more interesting in the book. It describes various pieces of desktop software that can be used to update or edit a blog, using the Blogger application programming interface (Blogger API), which is implemented for Extensible Markup Language remote procedure calls (XML-RPC). Several different applications, most of which are freely available, are discussed.
After chapter 2, the content becomes rather dry. Chapters 3 through 9 provide a detailed, step-by-step guide to setting up blogs using each of the chosen tools, with extra chapters on the advanced features of Blogger, Radio UserLand, and Movable Type. These advanced features include automatic (or semiautomatic) generation of a rich site summary (RSS) version of a blog. This is a set of XML tags that can be used by news and blog aggregators (such as http://www.weblogs.com), or by any site around the Web to monitor new content. There is also coverage of multiple-author group blogs, template customization, and adding a comments function. While these instructional chapters seem unbiased and well put together, with a copious quantity of screen shots (perhaps too many), I couldn’t help feeling that some of the detail was superfluous. After all, these tools have risen to prominence precisely because they are intuitive and easy to use. For example, the 27 pages devoted to Blogger’s simple, form-based Web interface, including creating an account, creating a blog, setting up hosting, and managing posts, seemed a little excessive, and would probably distract more advanced users.
“Blogging Voices,” the final chapter of the book, consists of a series of quotes from blog authors. Although rather short, this chapter provides good insight into the pitfalls of maintaining a blog, and hints at something altogether more interesting: the impact that the rise of blogs (the preface estimates that 1,500 to 3,000 new blogs are created every day) might have on the world. Numerous fascinating minor “blog phenomena” are recounted, ranging from blog authors who have been attacked for their political views, to those who maintain that composing a blog helps them to think more clearly.
The book is well laid out, has a good index and table of contents, and successfully meets its stated aim: to help those interested in blogging to select a Weblog tool and set up a blog. The text achieves this in a concise fashion, using colloquial but easy-to-follow language.
The level of detail is admirable, but this also means that the book is likely to become out of date very quickly. The authors frequently make references to factors that are clearly transient, such as a bug in a tool that is currently being worked on, an introductory price for a service, sites that seem to have been suffering from recent outages, or features that will be launched in the near future. The book was published in September 2002, and seems to have been written in the three months prior to that, but I suspect that by September 2003, its value and accuracy will have diminished significantly. Nevertheless, the book is still current as of January 2003, and I would therefore recommend it to anyone looking to set up a blog quickly who prefers to learn from books rather than Web sites.
