Chapter 17. Blogs

Throughout this book, you've learned how to craft a personalized Web site using the basic ingredients : HTML, style sheets, and JavaScript. Armed with this knowhow, you can build a fairly impressive site.

However, maintaining a Web site requires a significant investment of your time. You need to regularly review what you have, add fresh material, keep site navigation menus up to date, check old links, and periodically update your pages to incorporate the latest Web design trends. For some people, this constant grooming is funafter all, you get to tweak and fiddle with the most minute details until you get everything exactly the way you want it. But not everyone's that ambitious. Some people prefer to spend less time managing their Web site, and more time just creating content.

In this chapter, you'll learn about blogs , a self-publishing format that can help you avoid the headaches of Web site management. Blogs are a fresh, straightforward, and slightly chaotic way to communicate on the Web. To maintain a blog, you publish short entries whenever the impulse hits. Your blog posts are collected, organized (chronologically), and presented in HTML pages by high- powered blogging software. That means if you don't want to fuss with the fine details of Web site management, you don't need to. All you need to worry about is sending in the postingsand with some blogging software, that's as easy as firing off an email.

In this chapter, you'll see how to create your own blog with Blogger, one of the leading free services.