Blog Design Solutions

INTRODUCTION

Greetings and welcome to Blog Design Solutions. Given that you’re thumbing through this book, it’s probably fair to guess that either you want to set up a blog of your very own, or you already have one and want to make it stand out and look a bit, well, less boring.

Let’s face it: Unless you code your own blog from scratch (which, incidentally, is exactly what Chapter 7 of this book shows you how to do), you will have used a third-party blog engine of some kind to whip up your blog site. This has major advantages in that you don’t have to be a web-development expert to get a blog running, and it is a huge timesaver, but this is a double-edged sword: thousands of other people will have done exactly the same thing as you, so your blog will be far from individual in appearance, even if your postings have Oscar Wilde proportions of literary excellence.

But there’s a man who can help you. Eight men, in fact. And they wrote this book with one overriding goal in mind: to help you produce a blog that will stand out above the rest and attract more visitors to it, giving your hard-wrought prose the exposure it deserves. It doesn’t matter what level of technical know-how you have achieved; you’ll find something in here to improve your blog—whether it’s setting one up in the first place and giving it a bit of added sparkle, or taking your current blog and giving it an overhaul with some advanced CSS and template magic.
So how do we do it?

We start off our teachings slowly. In Chapter 1, Phil Sherry gives you a introduction to blogs and how they fit into today’s web community—how things work, what’s hot, and what’s not. In Chapter 2, we start to get a bit more technical, but don’t panic! A little thought now will save a lot of frustration later. Here, David Powers takes you gently through setting up your local machine to develop and test your blog and your remote server to host your final creation. Whether you are using Windows or Mac, you’re in good hands.

Chapters 3 to 6 explore four of today’s most popular blogging engines: Andy Budd looks at Movable Type in Chapter 3; Simon Collison looks at ExpressionEngine in Chapter 4; Chris J. Davis and Michael Heilemann look at WordPress in Chapter 5; and John Oxton looks at Textpattern in Chapter 6. In each chapter, the authors take you through installing the defaultblog on your system, and how to configure and customize it in a basic fashion. Then they run riot, showing you how to turn the default design into a mind-blowing custom blog by using a variety of CSS, Photoshop, templating, and other techniques!

But the ride isn’t over yet. As a special bonus, we commissioned Rich Rutter to write a chapter (Chapter 7) on building your own blog from scratch, using PHP and MySQL, for the ultimate level of customization.

What do you need?

As hinted earlier, this book is written to be fully compatible with both Windows PCs and Macs. Because all the blog engines discussed are built with PHP/Perl and MySQL (open-source software, which runs on basically any platform), you should also be able to get most of the examples to run on Linux/Unix-based systems if so inclined (although we don’t specif¬ically cover these systems).

Everything you need to use this book can be downloaded from the Web; the locations of all software you need to set up your development environment are listed in Chapter 2, and the locations of the blog engines themselves are detailed in Chapters 3-6 in the relevant places. Finally, all the source files for the custom sites developed by the authors throughout the course of Chapters 3-7 are available from the friends of ED website, www.friendsofed.com. Just search for the book using the books option on the main navigation menu, and all will become clear.
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