The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice On Creating And Maintaining Your Blog

by Rebecca Blood

Finally a book for anyone who has ever thought about starting a Weblog but wasn't sure how to post, where to find links, or even where to go to register. The Weblog Handbook is a clear and concise guide to everything one needs to know about the phenomenon that is exploding on the Web. Rebecca Blood expertly guides the reader through the whole process of starting and maintaining a Weblog and answers any questions that might pop up along the way, such as the elements of good Weblog design and how to find free hosting.

Genres: Web, Nonfiction, Website Design, Reference, Internet, Writing, Technology

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 13, 2002

Reviews

[Cat. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read with some good pointers on how to decide what you want to do with your blog. Focus is important to the author, but she's pretty liberal about the purpose of blogs. She does feel that they should have a clear purpose.

Blood also gives a lot of clear "etiquette" tips, as well as basic how-tos. There are loads of URLs too, but since the book is 3 years old, I'm not sure how useful they are.

A good, basic overview...well thought-out and not at all patronizing.

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you already have a blog of your own and have been posting to it for more than a month, or if you have been reading blogs for a while, then you have no need for this book. I’m not even sure that this book is necessary to understand weblogs or the weblog community if you are anything but a novice to the Internet. But I shouldn’t underestimate cluelessness, so if you feel in need of Blogs for Dummies, this is that miss-titled book.

That might seem harsh from a guy who only started his own blog a month ago, and I truly mean no disservice to Rebecca Blood, whose earnestness is apparent in every personal anecdote. But there’s no denying that this is a short, simple book–perhaps because a blog, in its basic form (a regularly updated web page where new information is arranged in reverse chronological order), is a very simple thing. The beauty of the form is in the voices of its authors, and, as Blood states herein, that often grows organically as the blog author constantly writes.

I read this book not so much for myself (although I had hoped to pick up something of use for my personal site) but as a possible book to hand to co-workers to help explain what blogs are and how we were experimenting with them as a business knowledge management tool. It fails for that purpose, too, unfortunately, as the concentration is on individuals doing it for themselves.

[Ron Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the time Rebecca Blood wrote this book, it was a landmark work. And it's still very good years later. What it does very well is

- give reasons to blog
- offer guidance to new writers

But the book needs an upgrade, and I admit Blood's subsequent book, which I have yet to read, may have done that. New bloggers I have spoken too wish that before they started they had known

- how much new technical knowledge they'd have to gain
- how important it is to integrate their blog with the social media
- the relationship between text content and media content

That last part is pretty critical. Blood's book comes from the very beginnings of blogging, when there was little media content - and you really get the impression from the format of the book that she was not in the practice of using media much herself.

BUT. If she did address my concerns in her second book, please allow me to apologize in advance. :-)

[Teena in Toronto · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been blogging and I found this book interesting because it talked about how weblogs came to be and various things such as etiquette, etc.

[Patrick Andrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rebecca's book was useful and gave a few practical pointers for bloggers.