Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content

by Biz Stone

Features hands-on tutorials for building a blog, adding a user based commenting system, adding team members, syndicating with JavaScript, adding searches to a site, and more. This book is useful for... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735712999
• ISBN13: 9780735712997
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: New Riders Publishing
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.5" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Genius Strategies...

I'd only been blogging for about a month and decided I needed a little help because I had NO IDEA how to change or format my blog. Genius Strategies led me into the murky world of HTML tags and other technicalities. This book gave me some excellent ideas to tweak my blog format and has given me the confidence to try some things which I might not have otherwise experimented with. I recommend this book if you're a beginner or a seasoned blogger. The technical information is top-notch and the resources in the appendix will occupy you for hours.

Great Book for New Bloggers

When I was curious about the social phenomenom of blogging, I looked through several books on the subject. The best of the lot was Blogging by Biz Stone. This book was very quick reading and helped me select a blogging software, which is a big decision you have to make right off the bat. You need to get a feel for whether you want to have somebody else host your blog or host it yourself. There is a decision to make on how much of the administrative tasks you want to take on. Biz's book allowed me to examine the popular blog providers and ferret out which provider was best for me. For someone that doesn't know HTML or CSS, there is a cut to the chase section to show you the basics. There are also some more advanced topics like group blogging, blogging for dollars, corporate blogging, syndication, and increasing blog site traffic. I highly recommend Blogging if you want to learn the basics of blogging in an easily readable book. Thanks, Biz.

Blogging without Flogging

Biz Stone's "Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content" is well-written, comprehensive, thorough and entertaining. Starting from ground zero, Biz explains how to create a blog, compares blogging service providers & programs and offers suggestions generating income via a blog. He also explains how to create group and corporate blogs for more efficient teamwork and dynamic communication.More than a basic blogging manual, Biz's book goes on to explain more complicated and sophisticated aspects of blogging such as Cascading Style Sheets, Sideblogs and Email Blogs and Syndicating A Blog. This book rapidly and easily develops the absolute beginner into a fairly sophisticated blogger.As a community college instructor in the area of computer graphic art and multimedia design, I strongly recommend this book for people who are eager to create an attractive, complete weblog even though he or she may know very little about weblogs when they pick up the book.

One of the best computer books I've read!

This book hits the mark on blogging!Biz has such a straight forward style it's like he's speaking to you. He doesn't take himself too seriously and it shows. More importantly though, he delivers sound advice on blogging.Wanting to see what blogging was all about, I bought his book. I learned about blogging, html, searching and all the useful add-ons in one concise, easy to read book. I can't recommend this any higher. It's the best computer book I've read in years.Oh yeah, I signed up for BloggerPro and have started my own blog. Way to go Biz.

Blogdiction

The major problem I have with this book is that I haven't been responding to anyone else's blogs much lately or even doing much else productive. I've been reading, trying, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding beyond my expectations.Stone talks about "finding your voice", group blogging and many things I had not even thought about when I started my own blog. But the best part for me, were the "blog toys". The sidebars of my Blog now feel much more professional and fun at the same time. The most intersting toys I found in the book were:1. The News Feed from moreover.com. I set up a search for "anti-war and protest and Iraq" and the list is continually updated. It's not always the news I think I'm going to get, but it's almost always something I want to read about. I now go to my own page to read the news!2. The Search feature from Atomz. Now that I have weeks worth of archives, I wondered how I was going to find my own past posts. Part of what I've find really good about blogging is that it gets my ideas "onto paper" even when they are not fully formed. I used to have a tendency to not write things down until I was read to "compose", and of course when I felt like writing, I couldn't remember any of it. Now, with the blog, most of the "essays" I've written are still half formed, but they are here, as reference, when I do get that "urge to write". And now I can even find them! And if anyone else should care to, the search is there!3. Metalinker, which links to other people who link to the same things you do from ThinkBlank. This adds a tag everywhere you have a link and links that to a page that shows all the other bloggers who link to the same page. Actually, I did make this work, but not the way I want, because it tags all my comment links, and side column links too. I really only want it to tag links in the main part of the blog entry. So I took it back out of my code.4. Bookwatch. Links to people who track books and music bloggers link to from Paul Bausch. This lists the top books, CDs and movies, as in number of links, mentioned by other bloggers.5. Create and sell your own merchandise without having to invest a penny at Cafe Press. This is really cool and I can't wait to have a change to create some items for the writers' group I belong to. You can send them images, they tell you how much it will cost you per item, and then you set the selling price, making the difference for yourself.6. Donations. I never thought to ask for donations. Okay, so no one's donated yet, but they might!7. Wil Wheaton has a blog! I almost didn't go look because he sounds rather like a jerk in the interview in the book, but when I did look, it turns out to be a funny, interesting and very left wing politically blog! I was impressed and glad I visited. The interview must have been done tongue-in-cheek but it didn't come to me that way when I first read it.There's still much more to the book, but it's time to take a break and return from cyberspace to the real wor