Google Blogger

Author: Wei-Meng Lee
Rating: 8

I found a great book on using Google's Blogger (what you are looking at when you read my weblog pages unless you are reading them using syndication). It's by a small publishing company called Rational Press. Amazingly - I received the book within just a couple days from order using standard USPS shipping. That's great service!

I was wanting to play around with more dynamic data and pushing the envelope of what blogger can do as a website and yet still stay simple to use. I was intrigued by the company's technical claim and the price - $14.99. This is information copied from their website...

Our Main Goal
We produce the most cost-effective and comprehensive guides on the market today. Because time is short and calendars are overloaded. Rational Guides are the only guide for a Fast-Paced World!

What We Do
Rational Press publishes books at a consistent quality and price on a wide variety of topics - both technical and non-technical.

Benefits To You
Rational Guides are 225 pages or less at a price of less than $25 (US Dollars). The guides are aimed at the beginner and intermediate audience level to help you get up to speed fast!

I've read the first three chapters immediately and was very impressed. It's straight to the point of how to along with clear explanations. Some things I've learned in the first few chapters:

• There are two syndication standards - RSS and Atom - syndication is a method of publishing weblog and other content to readers. A new blog syndication icon has been approved as all newsreaders read both formats. Google publishes blogs in the Atom format.
  
  
• You'll start to see more of this fellow as RSS and ATOM has a new icon. See my blog syndication logo at the bottom of my links.
  
  
• The author recommends RSS Bandit as a Newsreader for a Windows based program (needs the .net extensions) or the new Google web based Reader.
  
  
• You can send embedded images (not attached) in an e-mail to your blog and they will appear as sent - something I want to try - I've known that text could be sent, but not the images.
  
  
• The instant BlogThis! icon found on the Google Toolbar can be placed into your browser's links by going to the following website and dragging the shortcut to your links. Unfortunately I couldn't get my links to acknowledge this bit of javascript - some security is not letting me get this to work. If you know how, then please leave a message.
  
  
• There is a blogger client for Microsoft Word that can be downloaded from this google website. Something that I'll need to try.
  

Over the next week I continued working in the book and completed the next three chapters. I found the book a pleasure to read - concise and to the point. As claimed by the publisher, the premise of the book is to educate the reader on the basic and intermediate concepts. For example, while covering all the standard functionality of blogger and its various buttons and configurations, the text does not go into length on modifying the template's CSS style sheets for customized template design which would be in the realm of an advanced topic.

So here's some bullets about what I've learned in chapters 4-6.

• There's an option in the template setup to allow users to e-mail a post to their friends. This isn't something I've had turned on and I'll probably go ahead and do that. You'll start to see a little mail icon on the bottom of each post.
  
  
• Discussed various configurations and settings for comments that viewers can leave as well as how to manage those comments.
  
  
• All about how to setup the atom feed and placing the feed logo on the sidebar.
  
  
• How to add and manage team members to your blog - a google blog can have multiple users entering posts or managing the blog.
  
  
• Officially blogger allows up to 300mb of photos to be uploaded but hints that there might be some fudge factor on google's part to take more.
  
  
• Discussion on google's Picasa picture system and the Hello utility. I have Picasa loaded and use it for image editing. I provided a link to the free Picasa software on my sidebar that you can download and install. It does a rather good job and has some neat special affects without being difficult to use. I've tried the Hello utility, but I find the functionality simplistic and redundant to the blogger and Picasa.
  
  
• All about Flickr and FotoFlix which are photo hosting service - how to integrate them with blogger and how to add special notes to your pictures. Discussed the pros and cons of each.
  
  
• How to become an Amazon.com associate and integrate adverts into your blogsite - which I've done and I'm learning more every day.
  
  
• How to use Google's AdSense for Content as well as Adsense for Search and integrate those services into your blogsite - again, which I've done and I'm learning more about Google's Adsense service daily.
  
  

The final three chapters composed the "advanced" section of the guide. There was an additional fourth chapter on-line that is truly advanced - developing your own visual basic program for creating a Windows interface for editing your blogs. The offline concept is a cool idea - each book has a labeled serial number on the back cover - logging in to Rational Press allows the reader to download additional content. Great idea!

So here's my final bullets about what I've learned in chapters 7-9.

• Adding site counters using the free tool Statcounter - I actually already use this tool, but the book goes into a nice discussion on the various configurations.
  
  
• A short discussion on archiving options for your blog.
  
  
• Extensive detail on hosting your own blogger blogsite.
  
  
• All about blogger mobile - how to post from a mobile phone with camera using MMS messages and configuration of the blogger dashboard system.
  
  
• A very brief tidbit about Audioblogger. I'm not sure if the world is ready to start hearing me talk that much. Also - I had difficulty getting to the weblink so I'm not sure if this is still a valid Google service.
  
  
• A large portion is set aside to discuss Google's Reader program which allows the viewing of multiple blog sites within a web application (web application is good as you can view from multiple computers). I think one of the most interesting functions is the ability to classify blog posts (called labels) and then pull out those classified posts. For example - I might read an article about a digital cameras. I can tag that blog page with a label under digital cameras and then later refer to it simply by pulling up my classification code. I can see this being very handy.
  
  

Good book now that I'm done. I'll keep this around as a resource and grab onto it in order to refresh my memory from time to time.