My Web 2.0 Blogging Book is Here!
Well, it took me about six months longer to write that I’d expected, but How to Do Everything with Your Web 2.0 Blog is finally available. I got my author copies the other day, and I just noticed that Amazon is live and shipping. The book covers choosing a blogging application (I cover Blogger, TypePad, ExpressionEngine and, of course, WordPress) and then goes into some depth with customizing the blog’s design, multimedia offerings, headlines and so on and so on.
The book focuses mostly on incorporating existing Web 2.0 content into your blog and extending it onto the Web using social bookmarking and other services, and it even has a chapter that goes into how you can make money from your Web 2.0 blog. (Step One: write a book about Web 2.0 blogging. No, I’m kidding. Don’t do that. Less money for me.)
The one thing to watch out for in the Amazon description — I don’t know where they get that stuff…probably from the proposal. The book doesn’t really cover much PHP or AJAX scripting, as I figured out early on that I couldn’t fit that in a 400-page primer. Still, it lives on in the Amazon description, mocking me forever.
Anyway, if you’re interested in getting started with a blog and would feel more comfortable with a book by your side, check it out!
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11 Responses to “My Web 2.0 Blogging Book is Here!”
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Lovin’ the book, Todd! I got a banner on my blog, so hopefully that will generate some sales for you.
Can I have a banner and can I have an edition signed by the author?
I’ll send it to you. Pretty please? For “memorizing the prepositions” timesake?
I bought it last night to get started - Though you sy it took longer that you thought it would, I think the 2008 publish date will be a blessing. It made me look more closely at it and eventually buy it!
Todd - You RULE! I read your book before I got started with my blog, and it’s not even 2 months later and my blog has 2,795 hits as of this moment. I think that’s good for a first start on a blog? Is it?
but your book got me off to a good start!
I used a lot of what I learned from your book. I have looked at least 5 other books and they just don’t compare to yours in the ease of reading and quality of content. I even set up a forum to compliment my blog since the comments were rolling in, based on your suggestion.
Now I just need to work on the “make money from your blog” part,
Thanks!
Todd,
I just pick up your book Friday and I think it’s great. I wish I’d had it seven months ago when I was first setting up my blog! It would have shortened my learning curve.
I’m planning to sit down in front of my computer with chapter 4 to finally get some customization done that I’ve been putting off.
Great book.
Andrea
Thanks,
I have just got the book,
and I am started to go through it this month.
Sound not bad as I have scanned before for a short while.
In short, worth to read …
Mattcch2007 April-2008
Just picked up your book I am gonna enjoy learning as much as I can.. Thanks
Got the book and thoroughly enjoying it. Wanting to transfer my sites to wordpress and your book just makes everything crystal clear and will help my Internet and affiliate marketing goals come to be.
Thanks for the kind words everyone. Tell your friends!
I am reading your book. It has been very useful although there are many concepts that are still a little fuzzy. In the book you listed this blog and that this would be a place to ask clarifying or amplifying questions. I am not sure this is the method to do so but I can not see any other means of contacting you.
Questions:
What is the relationship between PHP, SQL and the various CMS’s? Do all CMS’s rely on them? Would any use Filemaker for instance?
You mentioned that Wordpress for instance is written in php.
So the CMS interfaces allows users to engage php scripts that access SQL data bases? When I post something the command actually activates a script that creates an SQL record much as I would if I accessed the data base directly?
Do all CMS’s have a search feature that access the underlying database?
Is it a complete keyword search? How does this relate to TAGGING content?
What does mean to have multiple databases? Are they independent or is there a relation?
If, for instance, I wanted to have an archive of resource articles (not posts) would these be stored in a searchable database? And would a search find these article as wells any posts/ comments that were related?
I hope THIS post is not too muddled but it reflects my current confusion. Would study of php and SQL books address this confusion?
Can you clarify?
Russ:
Happy to try and answer your questions.
What is the relationship between PHP, SQL and the various CMS’s? Do all CMS’s rely on them? Would any use Filemaker for instance?
PHP and MySQL are the most common combination of scripting language (PHP) and database technology (MySQL) used on the Web for blogging applications, though certainly not the only ones.
I imagine Filemaker Pro could be used, but it’s not a terribly robust backend database for that sort of application…nor is it as frequently found available from ISPs on hosted accounts. (A quick search of the Filemaker Pro solutions network doesn’t net any results in English for “blogging.”) I use Filemaker on a daily basis for ad tracking at our newspaper, but haven’t come across a blogging application written for it (and, to be honest, I’m not sure what scripting hooks exist in that sense).
That said, many blogging solutions use other scripting languages (Ruby on Rails, Perl, Java, Python) and database technologies (Postgres, Oracle, etc.), it’s just that the most common blogging tools that are installed by end-users seem to gravitate to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) combinations.
You mentioned that Wordpress for instance is written in php.
So the CMS interfaces allows users to engage php scripts that access SQL data bases? When I post something the command actually activates a script that creates an SQL record much as I would if I accessed the data base directly?
Yup. And when the CMS is accessed by an end user, it accesses that database and drops the data found there (your entry, date information, author information, categories) into an XHTML template and displays it to the user’s browser.
Do all CMS’s have a search feature that access the underlying database?
Is it a complete keyword search? How does this relate to TAGGING content?
Generally they do have search features, although the robustness of that feature depends on the programmers of the blogging tool. Some might cheat for speed and search less than the whole entry; others might cleverly index your entries and search against them.
This doesn’t quite relate to tagging — tagging is sort of a freeform categorization that enables you to assign keywords as metadata to your entries. (In some cases, the CMS might allow the end-user to tag items as well.) That’s for convenience in retrieving those human-tagged items more than anything else…click the tag “Apple” and all items with that tag can be displayed by the CMS, even if they’re in different categories (perhaps News, Reviews, Features, Want Ads or whatever).
What does mean to have multiple databases? Are they independent or is there a relation?
I’m not sure where I got into multiple databases in the book, but it’s true that ExpressionEngine, for instance, prides itself on being able to create multiple tables (or “blogs”) within a database that can then be related to one another via a given identifying field. Create an “events” blog, for instance, and one of the fields can access the “venues” blog; you can then display information about a venue and its associated events on the same page.
(See the upcoming events section on this page: http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/jfp.php/events/location/57)
If, for instance, I wanted to have an archive of resource articles (not posts) would these be stored in a searchable database? And would a search find these article as wells any posts/ comments that were related?
They should, although again the usefulness of the results will depend on the robustness of the CMS in question. I, for instance, have opted to rely on Google for searching the Jackson Free Press website; from the homepage, a Google search is used for the archives.
Google Search of Jackson Free Press site for keywords “Frank Melton”.
That’s not for having done any particularly exhausting testing of EE’s internal search capabilities, but rather just a “sense” on my part from using both that Google might be better at newspaper archives.
Hope that helps…let me know if you have other questions.