"Publishing a Blog with Blogger"

Original title: "Blogging through Cyberspace"

Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Jim Mahood. All rights reserved.

If you’re languishing on the fringes of the Internet, Publishing a Blog with Blogger by Elizabeth Castro is all the help you need to plunge directly into the blogosphere, or world of blogging, arguably the most important and popular Web development in recent years.

I’m no techie, but with Castro’s colorfully illustrated little volume, I built the blog you're reading now in less than 15 minutes to archive my book reviews after they’re published in the newspaper.

Creating an archive of previously published writing is not, of course, the usual purpose of a blog. The word blog is a contraction of Web log, and it means a log, journal, diary, or the like, so most blogs are built to share thoughts, experiences, and photographs with friends, relatives, and strangers. Imagine a form of communication that combines e-mail, personal letters, journals, diaries, and photo albums, and you’ve probably described most of the blogosphere.

Corporations and other organizations use blogs for team projects in order to communicate with one another and to archive their combined progress. Journalists use blogs as a way to broadcast news and opinions not carried by more traditional media. Photographers use blogs to exhibit their newest creations. You could blog a family newspaper, group letter, or photo album.

The advantages of building a blog at blogger.com are that it’s free, well-designed, and easy to use. But Blogger, which is a division of Google, is not the only site offering free blog hosting. Two others are http://www.blogstream.com and http://www.myblogsky.com. You don’t even need Castro’s book to build a rudimentary blog and hurl it into cyberspace, as the following easy steps show:

Navigate to a blog host such as http://www.blogger.com. Click “Create Your Blog Now.” Set up a Blogger account (user name, password, etc.). Choose a template. That’s all there is to it; your blog is built. You can start posting immediately, and your posts will be visible via the Internet anywhere in the world. As you probably know, posts are your content—your text or pictures.

Blogger.com does all the difficult work such as design the layout, insert HTML (the markup language used to create Web pages), organize your posts, and archive all of the nice Comments you expect to receive from visitors. The book, which is published by Peachpit Press (http://www.peachpit.com) out of Berkeley, California, will help you with additional steps and nuances.

For example, Castro tells you how to sign in and out of your blog, publish your first post, edit an existing post, save a draft, publish a draft, create Settings, link to another blog, add formatting, add a picture, delete a post, delete obscene and other unwanted Comments, turn on Word Verification to prevent Comment spam, and arrange for notification by e-mail every time a visitor Comments.

A problem with Castro’s book, which runs 127 pages, is that it doesn’t offer much help getting your url (your Internet address) into search engines other than Google. But it does explain other ways to get exposure such as by using your url as a signature line in e-mails and newsgroup postings.

You can save 10 percent by ordering Publishing a Blog with Blogger directly from the publisher for $11.69 at http://www.peachpit.com, or you can buy a copy for $12.99 at your favorite online or bricks-and-mortar bookstore. You might also like to read a brief but excellent history of the blogosphere in the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogosphere).

If you set up a blog, please let me know by leaving your url as a Comment on this blog. Many thanks to the South Puget Sound Macintosh Users’ Group (http://spsmac.org) for asking me to present this topic at its October 2005 meeting.

This review was originally published in the December 2005 issue of The Thurston-Mason Senior News, Olympia, WA.