Product Description
Blogging has moved rapidly from being a craze to become a core feature of the Internet—from individuals sharing their thoughts with the world via online diaries, through fans talking about their favorite sports teams or music, right up to serious business minds discussing industry futures.
And that includes you, right? If you haven’t got a blog already, you want to start one, and want to find out how. If you have already got one, you want to know how to customize it, and make it look cooler than everybody elses. In either case, this is the ideal book for you.
In this book, a team of renowned web designers take you through the ins and outs of putting together great blogs. They waste no time harking on about the philosophy of blogs, or the community behind them. Instead, they get straight to the practical details, showing how to set up a basic blog in some of the world's most popular blogging engines Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, and Textpattern. With your blog set up, they then show you how to build great looking, usable layouts for your blog. The last chapter even shows you how to build your very own PHP/MySQL-based blog engine!
With this book in hand, you’ll have found your way to blog heaven in no time!
About the Author
Andy Budd is one of the founding partners at User Experience Design Consultancy, Clearleft. As an interaction design and usability specialist, Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like Web Directions, An Event Apart, and SXSW. Andy curates dConstruct, one of the U.K.'s most popular design conferences. He's also responsible for UX London, the U.K.'s first dedicated usability, information architecture, and user experience design event.
Andy was an early champion of web standards in the U.K. and has developed an intimate understanding of the CSS specifications and cross-browser support. As an active member of the community, Andy has helped judge several international design awards and currently sits on the advisory board for .NET magazine. Andy is also the driving force behind Silverbackapp, a low-cost usability testing tool for the Mac. Andy is an avid Twitter user and occasionally blogs at andybudd.com.
Never happier than when he's diving in some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.
In October 2006, Simon Collision started Erskine Design—based in Nottingham, U.K.—which grew to become an eight-strong team of creative web designers and developers who are afraid of nothing. Some people say they're one of the best agencies out there, and their clients include major magazines, government stuff, software companies—and polar explorers.
Moons ago, he was a successful visual artist, and founded an independent arts org and annual arts festival, putting his degree to some use at least. Then he caught the interwebs bug.
As lead web developer at Agenzia from 2002 to 2006, he worked on numerous web projects for major record labels (such as Poptones, Universal) and bands (including The Libertines, Dirty Pretty Things, Beta Band), visual artists and illustrators (Jon Burgerman, Paddy Hartley, Lucy Orta, NOW Festival), businesses, community, and voluntary sector orgs, passionately ensuring everything was accessible and complied with current web standards.
He does a bit of public speaking here and there, and will generally do anything for a biscuit and cup of tea, but prefers hard cash.
He has lived in many cities, including London and Reykjavik, but has now settled back in his beloved Nottingham, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. He also drives a 31-year-old car, and has a stupid cat called Bearface.
Chris J. Davis is a Web developer and Mac enthusiast living in central Kentucky. He is a hacker on the WordPress Project and K2, the successor to the open source template Kubrick. Recently, he has begun working with the Apache Software Foundation.
A bio is not available for this author.
Phil Sherry is a self-taught web developer during the day in Liverpool, and a freelance web anarchist for the remaining hours of the day. With lingering bad memories of having to use dial-up connection for years, he still does his best to design sites for the lowest common denominator. That means lower resolutions too, as well as people with slower machines (let's not mention those poor Windows users). Working with Jake Smith, several rock gods have had their web presences greatly enhanced over the years, including Andy Rourke, the ex-bass player from The Smiths. Phil has previously worked on several friends of ED books, and also beta tested several key Adobe products. A self-confessed geek, Phil can usually be found in a room full of computers, surrounded by screens of ASCII.
David Powers is an Adobe Community Expert for Dreamweaver and author of a series of highly successful books on PHP, including PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. As a professional writer, he has been involved in electronic media for more than 30 years, first with BBC radio and television and more recently with the Internet. His clear writing style is valued not only in the English-speaking world; several of his books have been translated into Spanish and Polish. What started as a mild interest in computing was transformed almost overnight into a passion, when David was posted to Japan in 1987 as BBC correspondent in Tokyo. With no corporate IT department just down the hallway, he was forced to learn how to fix everything himself. When not tinkering with the innards of his computer, he was reporting for BBC television and radio on the rise and collapse of the Japanese bubble economy. Since leaving the BBC to work independently, he has built up an online bilingual database of economic and political analysis for Japanese clients of an international consultancy. When not pounding the keyboard writing books or dreaming of new ways of using PHP and other programming languages, David enjoys nothing better than visiting his favorite sushi restaurant. He has also translated several plays from Japanese.
