Chapter 13. Advanced Blogging Techniques | Blogosphere: Best of Blogs

If you have a blog, how can you make it more interesting or more "you"? Blog popularity is due in large part to blogs' simplicity. Blog hosts have made setting up a personal site easy. Everyone on the Internetno matter what level of technical proficiencyis capable of setting up a blog.

But what if you're a little further along in the blog experience and are ready for a change? One of the best ways is to redesign your blog and add new features. This chapter takes an existing blog and tweaks it so that it's more your style. You learn how to

Customize your blogAdd an image or change colorsby editing the blog template
"Automate" your site so that your readers know when a new post appears using a technology called RSS
Subscribe to dozens of blogs and receive their most recent posts automatically using RSS aggregators
Connect with other bloggers using a commenting technology called trackbacks

Let's look at site redesign first. Basically this involves grabbing your blog's template and modifying the HTML and CSS in the template. What are HTML and CSS? Here's the quick description:

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) The native language of the World Wide Web. HTML codes are used to format a page for display to the user. Codes such as <body></body> for the body of the page and <table></table> for tables are used (along with many others). You can learn more about HTML codes and how to use HTML at this address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) A newer standard for formatting web pages. CSS separates the presentation of a page (how it looks) from its content (what the page says). You can design with HTML alone, but making changes to the way HTML looks also changes the content. CSS changes do not affect content. You can read more about CSS at this address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets.

If you've never seen CSS or HTML before, just walk through the exercises to learn how your blog template operates before actually making changes.