Blog Design Solutions

Blogging has moved rapidly from being a craze to become a core feature of the Internet from individuals sharing their thoughts with the world via online diaries, through fans talking about their favorite sports teams or music, right up to serious business minds discussing industry futures. And that includes you, right? If you haven't got a blog already, you want to start one, and want to find out how. If you have already got one, you want to know how to customize it, and make it look cooler than everybody elses. In either case, this is the ideal book for you. In this book, a team of renowned web designers take you through the ins and outs of putting together great blogs. They waste no time harking on about the philosophy of blogs, or the community behind them. Instead, they get straight to the practical details, showing how to set up a basic blog in some of the world's most popular blogging engines &emdash; Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, and Textpattern. With your blog set up, they then show you how to build great looking, usable layouts for your blog. The last chapter even shows you how to build your very own PHP/MySQL-based blog engine! With this book in hand, youll have found your way to blog heaven in no time! Summary of contents:

* Chapter 1: The "Web Log"
* Chapter 2: Creating a Local Test Environment for Your Blog
* Chapter 3: Movable Type
* Chapter 4: ExpressionEngine
* Chapter 5: WordPress
* Chapter 6: Textpattern
* Chapter 7: Write Your Own Blog Engine

This book will be extremely helpful to the new blogger who desires insight into the ins and outs of blogging, as well as the logistical knowledge (geeky know-how) required to install and use four of the most popular blogging systems available today (MovableType, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, and Textpattern). Its depth regarding the specifics of each blogging system is shallow, but given the obvious diversity of the content and targeted audience, this should be expected. To that point, most of the authors explicitly acknowledge only being able to give a small glimpse into the depths of each blogging system.

The four chapters, dedicated each to a specific blogging system, are an excellent starting point for the blogging newbie. However, this comes at a price. That is, in order to digest the four chapters which focus on a specific system, an individual must first digest the technical matters discussed in chapter 2 (LAMP, WAMP, MAMP). I don't see this as a downfall of the book, but rather as the place where the learning curve might jump beyond the targeted audience.

Once the reader has digested chapter 2, the book moves straight into the implementation and usage of MovableType. At this point, I think the authors made a critical error by not including a chapter dedicated to an objective overview and comprehensive comparison of the four blogging systems showcased. For example, ExpressionEngine has very specific strengths in the realm of user management that should have been compared and contrasted against the other systems. The reason being, that a majority of the noise found on the Internet concerning blogging is dedicated to this exact issue. As well, it never fails. Each and every person blogging today did (or eventually will) seek an objective overview and comprehensive comparison of the blogging systems available. Without a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of each system, readers are left to essentially pick one of the systems randomly, hoping they are picking the one that best suits their needs. Questions like, "which system provides the easiest template manipulation?", "which systems support community plug-ins?", and "which system is the easiest to get up-and-running?" are left for readers to either deduct from one small chapter or research and answer elsewhere.

As for the last chapter, I was a little confused by its worth to a blogging newbie (at whom the book is obviously targeted). I'm almost sure that if you need a book to show you how to install Textpattern, then the last chapter of this book is way over your head from a technical perspective.

The book's saving grace is the fact that it was published at all. Given the options (none at this point), this book is well worth the purchase if your goal is to get up and running with next to no knowledge about the topic at hand. Of course, I hear that Typo 3 has a book.

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Publishing a Blog with Blogger: Visual QuickProject Guide

If you want to start blogging fast, but don’t want to get sidetracked by the details, then you need a Visual QuickProject Guide!

Writing in a journal is all well and good, but when you're ready to share your musings with the world (and you think the world is ready to receive them!), a blog is the way to go. For just $12.99, this compact guide shows you how! Using big, bold full-color pictures and streamlined instructions, it covers just the need-to-know essentials that will get you blogging with leading free blog software--Google’s Blogger--in a matter of minutes. Best-selling author Elizabeth Castro takes you through each step of the blogging process--from acquainting you with the interface to setting up your blog, creating your profile, posting email, adding pictures and audio, and more. Occasional sidebars and tips point out other useful blogging tips and tricks.

This book is very visual, lots of fun, and easy to read and understand---in short, perfect for the beginning blogger. It is the exact opposite of a reference manual, and thus is very hands on. Note that this book is only for people who want to use Blogger, which is free, to publish their blog. If you don't know what you want to publish your blog with, you like the "free" part, and you're not a business, you probably will be very, very happy with Blogger. So this would definitely be the book for you.

It is only 127 pages, so it's not overwhelming to read. You can easily go through it over a weekend and get your blog up and running. If you have HTML or XHTML experience, you'll find lots of good things, too, so slightly more experienced bloggers may still pick up a few tips, like how to change their header on a template or how to syndicate their blog.

If you are a geek, you won't need this book. You'll just log onto Blogger and think it's "intuitive" and be able to do everything. However, if you're like me and get stuck a lot, even with so-called "intuitive" software, you'll love this book.

Even though this book was published in 2005, and yes, Blogger is in a new version, I haven't found any problems applying what is in the book. None at all. The new version of Blogger just does more things for you; everything in the book still needs to be done one way or another. So it's doesn't make the book dated as far as it's utility goes. If you're really a beginner (which is who this book is for) you might not even notice.

There are pictures throughout of what the screens look like, so instead of TELLING you what to do and letting you figure it out, the book SHOWS you what to do and you just follow along. It keeps things as simple as possible.

Highly recommended for beginning bloggers.

I really thought this book was great, showing and giving more information than Discovering Computers. I recommend the book Publishing a Blog with Blogger for those who want to make a blog fast.

Chapters:

• Introduction- talks about what a blog is and how it works, what tools you need, and offers additional help, along with how to use the book.
• 1. Starting your blog- tells you where you have to go, set your account, name your blog, choose a template, viewing your dashboard, and signing in and out.
• 2. Writing your blog- tells you how to get down to the writing. How to add ,edit, and your posts, linking blogs, saving and publishing your draft, and formatting and your pictures.
• 3. Bloggoing from afar- tells you how to blog an email, blog from your toolbar, set up and label audio blogger , and also blog on your cell phone.
• 4. Personalizing your blog- tells how to add the description, more about templates and picking one, adding links, removing and renaming sections, adding your previous posts, changing headers and adding footers, unifying your color scheme, saving ,republishing, and backing up the templates , and changing the dates and time zone display.
• 5. Telling others about yourself- tells how to view and edit your profile, add photos to your profile, adding general info., blurbs, and searchable bits, searching others profiles and how to format your "about me".
• 6. Getting others to contribute- How to leave, view, allow, delete, stop, hide, and bar comments, adding and removing members, formatting members posts, and joining a blog.
• 7. Hosting your blog yourself- Tells you how to get a web host, web domain, switching to your FTP, FTP settings, testing, posting, and adding photos to your FTP'd blog, and removing you navbar.
• 8. Getting the word out- Shows how to List your blog, announce new posts, syndicate your blog, offer link to site feed, and how to index you blog.

Summary:
In Publishing a Blog with Blogger, the author helps you start a blog fast. Without any of detail that might side track you. Shows you how to set things up step by step.

It seems to be very easy to follow with colorful pictures and brief description on the steps you take. Anyone can start easily with this book.

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Where to Get Cheap Web Hosting

First, to see if you can use cheap web hosting you need to know how much disk space you will need. How large is your website? How many pages, video files, music files, etc. do you need?

Second, a cheap web hosting company will need to know how busy your sight will be. If your site is going to have a lot of visitors, cheap web hosting may not be for you.

Third, how many email accounts do you need? Cheap web hosting companies do not usually provide many. Lastly, how much are you willing to spend? Cheap web hosting is not as technical as the more expensive web hosting.

If you go online, you can find a list of the top 10 cheap web hosting companies. The top 10 cheap web hosting companies are rated by their price, quality, and service provided.

The cheap web hosting companies are priced between $4.95 and $19.95 a month.

The cheap web hosting company's price varies on what kind of things you need. The disk space provided can be from 3000MB to 5000MB. The bandwidth varies from 40GB to 300GB. If this is not enough for you, then a cheap web hosting company is not an option for you. Most of these cheap web hosting companies offer free set up.

This will make things much easier for you. Be aware of cheap web hosting that offers unlimited disk space. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

The top 10 web hosting companies reviewed are: Blue Host, Power Hosting, Pages Garden, Pro Logic Hosting, Easy CGI, Gigabyte Package, Yahoo! Hosting, iPower Web, Lunar pages, and Dot5 Web Hosting. All of these are very cheap web hosting companies. You will find them listed at top10webhosting.com.

At this website you will also find customer testimonials and thorough listings about the cheap web hosting company's services they offer to you.

For those of you who still think that this is not cheap web hosting, you can also find free web hosting. It still comes with a price, however. Comcast offers free web hosting to anyone who subscribes to their internet service. You still have to pay for the internet service, but the web hosting is free. That's the best that can be done about cheap web hosting. Weigh the odds, and see which route is best for you.

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Criteria of Choosing an Ideal Web Hosting Company

Before we talk about what it takes to be a cheap and good quality web host, let's get to the fundamental first.

What is a Web Host?

A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. The term for this 'computer' is called a server.

A web hosting provider will typically have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web.

With a well-managed web host, you can free yourself from worrying the up-keep of complicated server technology and proper technical maintenance. That's the whole purpose of the web hosting companies. You should leave the technical work to web hosting professional while you focus on your own internet business.

Feature Offered

The features that web hosting companies are offering are getting quite standard nowadays.

The followings are some of the common features you'll see in most web hosting plans:

* Control Panel
Control Panel is an interface where you can access your site on the web server, allowing you to set-up and subsequently update and customize your web site. Though cPanel is by far the most popular control panel, some hosting providers customize their own so that they can up-grade and expand it at will.

* Diskspace
A vast majority of sites that don't have tons of graphics, sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit in 50 MB of disk space. You should always leave yourself some room for growth or check if the host has a bigger plan in case you need to upgrade.

* Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted or received through a unit of time. In web hosting, bandwidth is consumed when visitors make requests for files on your web site and download them to their personal computers.

* Email Account
With POP3 email accounts you can check email from Outlook, Netscape Mail, Eudora or any other Email software.

* Scripting language
As all our top 10 listings are using Unix and Linux platform, php, perl and CGI are the languages we are talking about here. It is best to choose a host that supports the latest version to maximize the latest web technologies for the fee that you pay.

* Database
If your web site is going to store a lot of data that should be dynamically accessible (like user accounts, stock prices, maps, Interactive news, message boards and forum etc.), you'll need to look for an account that offers a database. MySQL is a powerful and most popular database program that runs on the Linux operation system. It is able to handle million of entries all at once. Its flexibility and speed allow you to also store logs and pictures. MySQL is designed to scale well under heavy traffic conditions and is ideal for database-intensive or e-commerce-enabled Web sites.

Price to Disk Space / Price to Bandwidth Ratio

Are you paying too much for your Web Hosting Plan?
Having done the research on hundreds of web hosting companies, in general, we've come to this conclusion: the more disk space and bandwidth you are getting, the more expensive is the monthly price.

To help you understand which price is competitive enough for you to take up the offer, we have categorized 5 different price range. For each price range, a score of maximum of 10 is assigned. To understand the concept behind this, please refer to the details here.

Popularity
A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer support and reliability in place but without an effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let's face it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady growth of new members, it's very difficult to survive in this highly competitive industry.

We judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider by looking at the number of awards won, the reviews of other websites and the Alexa traffic ranking.

Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee
Nothing can hurt you more than this: your visitors come to your web site only to find that it's not accessible. You lose credibility and possibly even a sale. If your web host does not guarantee at least a 99% uptime, leave the web host now!

To ensure maximum uptime, installation of redundant back-up systems is essential. Each web host has their own management systems to minimize downtime. "Redundant" means that if any of the Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet connection will take over.

We use Alertra software to monitor the uptime of each of our top 10 web hosts.

As for speed, even though routing, web server set up and local area networks play a part in determining the speed of a site, the main concern of how fast your site is depends very much on the types of network connections.

Many hosting providers still connect to the Internet through T1, or T3 connections. This is not the case for our top 10 hosts- they are using OC (Optical Carrier) lines.

A T1 line will offer data transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second), while a T3 line can supply data transfer rates of 43Mbps. OC-1 refers to a circuit that transmits 51.85Mbps. Higher levels are multiples of that speed. Ultra-High Speed OC3 and OC12 lines offers 155Mbps and 622Mbps respectively. Some hosting providers have connections to major internet backbones at the speed of OC48 (2488Mbps) and OC96 (4976Mbps).

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CGI Web Hosting - Useful Scripts for your Busines

If there's one thing that people love it is a web site that has plenty of automated features. Sites that are highly interactive tend to get the most traffic and generate the most business for the companies that run them.

Automated features can also play a "behind the scenes" role, making your site easier to use, run smoothly and allow for things like online sales and password protection.

There are many ways to get this type of automation into your site, but all involve either client side or server side scripting.

Scripts are written in programming languages specially designed for the web, and there are several languages that are commonly used. Most client side scripts are written in Java which is still one of the best web programming languages around.

Some functions of a web site must be completed via server side scripting, however, and the most commonly used languages for server side scripting are PHP, PERL, and CGI. PHP and PERL are newer languages and are gaining a lot of popularity, but there are still plenty of features that can be scripted in the granddaddy of web scripting languages, CGI.

Shopping Carts

No online sales site would be complete without a functioning shopping cart and most of the best ones have been written in CGI script.

CGI web hosting is great for shopping cart scripts because it interfaces well with most databases, including the popular MYSQL and MS Access databases, it can be utilized on Windows, UNIX, LINUX, and MACOS servers with equal ease, and can be easily configured for sales tax and shipping cost calculations.

Some newer shopping cart scripts are being written in PHP and PERL, but most of the functioning carts on the web are in good old CGI web hosting scripts.

Password Protection

Many web sites require some sort of registration and entry of a password for the user to access the site's features. This is done for a number of reasons from simply a desire to track visitors for marketing purposes to allowing postings on message boards and ensuring that users have paid any required fees associated with use of the site.

The automated registration process and user name/password issuance can be written with CGI scripts and many of them have been.

Form Managers

Have you ever wondered how the forms you fill out online are handled? In most cases, they're handled by CGI web hosting.

When a user fills in that form and hits the "submit" button, a CGI script takes over and sends the data in email or writes it to a database where it can be accessed later by the site's administrators.

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