A blog or weblog is a great way to get started on the web and Blogger.com from Google is one of the most popular software for creating weblogs. In her book, Elizabeth Castro assumes that this may be your first web project as she walks you through the basics for creating a blog at Blogger.com.
First, she gives you an overview of Blogger.com, what the software does, and why she chose it as the subject for her book. After she introduces you to the Blogger Dashboard (the control panel where all the work is done), Castro shows you how to open a Blogger account, give your weblog a name and choose a template. The template does all the work for you when creating your weblog pages. All you need is the content that you want to publish and the template places everything in the correct spot on the webpage. Castro does a great job explaining all of this with step-by-step instructions and lots of illustrations.
Once you have posted your first weblog entry, Castro moves on to more advanced Blogger features such as working with the template tags to customize the look of your blog, how to control the members and comments features, how to post an entry by email and how to use Audioblogger to post an entry via the telephone.
Now that you have your weblog ready for the public, Castro discusses hosting your blog through Blogger's BlogSpot hosting or on your own server. Finally, she shows the many ways to publicize your blog including email and site feeds.
Elizabeth Castro has written many other Visual QuickStart Guide books for Peachpit Press.
