CMS Inside

Published in 2005, this book has, to an extent, become obsolete. In general the HTML hasn’t changed, but during the last few years Blogger has updated its interface so what you see as an example in the book won’t correspond 1-to-1 with what you’ll see on today’s Blogger pages.

Now if this doesn’t intimidate you, then you might go ahead and consider this little book for a quick-look-see into how Blogger works. (I’d get it from the library though).

Here’s the TOC so you can see what’s covered.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Starting your blog

Writing your blog

Blogging from afar

Personalizing your blog

Telling others about yourself

Getting others to contribute

Hosting your blog yourself

Getting the word out

Appendix a: template tags

Index

Appearance of the material:

Nice format with enough color to keep it interesting. The font is large-ish so that I didn’t have to wear me specs. In general, there’s not alot of text which is something I appreciate. Ms. Castro gets down to business without a great deal of fluff.

The material is taught using the “screen shot” approach. This approach seems to work well for computer oriented learning.

My Impressions

While the screen shots of the menus no longer correspond with Blogger today I had no problem following what she was saying. I DO think it might be a problem for the true Newbie. If you are too timid to just throw yourself into Blogger and experiment, then this book will likely only succeed in confusing you.

To give an example, there is no Layout Tab in the book’s Blogger examples.

Sooo, in my opinion the true residual use of the book is the html fixes that the author demonstrates. She shows, for example, how to rename “Archives” as “File Cabinet” in edit mode; and also how to change the look of the header, changing the padding and altering the color to exactly what you want.

Pam T.
Rating: 2 / 5

Elizabeth Castro is one of the best tech authors out there. Her book on HTML (HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide)) is an absolute classic and belongs in every serious techie’s library.

However, this book on using Google Blooger dates from 2005 and is seriously outdated. The newcomer will be much better served by Google Blogger For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))which has just been released.

Blogger’s interface has changed considerably since the time Castro’s book was published and a newcomer might not be able to easily understand the differences. “Google Blogger for Dummies” also offers somewhat more depth.

“Publishing a Blog with Blogger” was good for its time, but its time is past.

Jerry
Rating: 3 / 5