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Well, I finished chapters 2 and 3 of Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook, and man, am I impressed by her writing. Especially the 3rd chapter, about creating and maintaining a weblog.
But I guess I'll start with the second chapter. The section on blogging being a form of self-discovery was just wonderful. I only recently came to that conclusion myself, after talking about it with a friend of mine. You do get to learn a lot about yourself, especially about your subconscious self, by reading your own blog after you publish it. If you write like a lot of people do, without a huge amount of forethought, you can sometimes pick up on subtleties in your thought process that you wouldn't otherwise see.
She also talks a lot in the second chapter about how to use blogs for business. Granted, this doesn't mean a whole lot to me since I don't exactly have a career right now, but I like her ideas, especially the concept of using a blog as a place for employees to read company memos and the like. I suppose it would work something like our class blog does. Pretty cool.
Okay, NOW can I go on to the third chapter? Pleeeeeze? I can? Whee!
I love this chapter. A lot of the things that she talks about are things I know from my own experiences, and she also has a few suggestions (like adding a copyright notice) that I never even thought of.
When she said that you don't have to know HTML to start a blog with a service (like Blogger, though it wasn't mentioned by name), but you should learn it as you go, in my head I was yelling "Yes!". Truthfully, I only learned the HTML and stylesheets things I know by blogging. I started mine up last January, before Blogger did their big upgrade and added all those funky cool new templates. I think they only had six of them, and I thought they were all kinda boring, so I went on a search for a new one. I found one I liked (the one I'm using now, as a matter of fact), copied and pasted the code, and figured I'd be fine from then on.
But soon after that I realized that there were some features (like entry titles and things) that I wanted, but they weren't included on the template. So what I did was basically open up the template and start playing around with it (note: it was on noipo.org, which is a free template page, and they are under a Creative Commons Licence, which allows users to alter the template as much as they want; some template creaters don't do that). I knew a little bit of the HTML stuff from creating my own website a few years ago while I was still in high school, but I knew literally NOTHING about stylesheets. I didn't even know the term for them until after I'd spent some time messing with them on my own. When I wanted to know something, I went and looked it up (Webmonkey is a good place to start), or sometimes I would more or less just analyze the code and start typing in things to see what worked and what didn't. Of course I did it the "stupid" way, not starting a new experimental blog or even saving my template before I started (and I DON'T recommend doing that; if you're going to mess with it, at the very least save the template as a text document on your computer/disk before you do). Eventually I was able to customize my template to the way I wanted it. I still tweak it frequently, actually.
Wow, this is getting really long... lemme see if there was anything else I wanted to talk about...
Two more quick notes, then I'm done. First, a couple of the add-on type things she mentioned (searching and comments) were just recently added to Blogger's service, so they're super-easy to have on the blogs now (and I'm jealous... I had to go searching for a commenting service on my own... ). Also, her comment about website maintainers going through their list of referrers to see who's linking to them made me laugh, because I do that all the time. Also, when you use the "Next Blog" button on the Blogger toolbar, it shows the blog the visitor was at before the toolbar took them randomly to your blog. Just an interesting phenomena I wanted to mention.
All right, hope you're happy... this post is longer than anything I've written in MONTHS. Just sending it on it's way.
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