Editor Reviews:

Product Description:

In Detail

Blogger is a blog publishing system from Google with a friendly interface specifically designed for creating and maintaining weblogs.

It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features including RSS feeds, link-backs, photo slideshows, and integration with popular Google applications like Picasa. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

If you want to create powerful, fully-featured blogs in no time, this book is for you. This book will focus on transforming a typical blog into something fresh and professional that stands out from the crowd. It starts with an introduction to an example blog, discussing what it is lacking, and then adding all the features of Blogger to make it successful. This book will tell you how to transform a slow-paced typical business blog into an attractive and interactive profit-making blog with measurable results. It has a very user-friendly approach and shares tips, tricks, and resources to continue to grow your blog.

What you will learn from this book?

• Customizing and creating templates to make your blog attractive
• Adding social bookmarks to your blog to promote your site
• Joining the blogosphere to drive traffic to your site
• Customizing your blog by using widgets effectively
• Customizing your blog's RSS and Atom feed, so that the Blogger feeds are available to the users
• Managing ads and adding e-commerce features
• Monitoring viewers and ads using Google Analytics
• Managing and optimizing your blog for search engines
• Integrating your website with your blog

Approach

Written in a clear, easy-to-read style, the book takes you through the essential tasks required to create a feature-rich blog as quickly as possible. From initial setup to customizing modules, each task is explained in a clear, practical way using an example blog developed through the book. You'll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools.

This book deals with using the current Blogger and third-party tools to optimize and create widgets for your blog. You'll transform your blog using existing tools then take it further with more challenging approaches to customizing your blog. All the steps involved in each example are listed under the section called "Time for action". Similarly, the results of that action are listed under the section called "What just happened". This structure adds to the clear, simple, and focused approach of the book.

Who this book is written for?

The book is aimed at current users of the Blogger platform who want to get the most out of Blogger and people who use a different blogging platform and are planning on switching to Blogger. Blog owners who promote their own services, expertise, and products, and want to increase their blog's success by pushing the limits of what Blogger can do will get the most out of this book.

The book doesn't require any specific knowledge of Blogger or the related technologies: RSS, CSS, HTML, and XML. Everything you need to know to grow beyond the basics is covered in this book. The companion website to this book (bloggerbeefedup.blogspot.com) includes free resource images and content.

Rating : - Excellent Book For Everything Except One Aspect Of Blogger
This is a clearly written explanation of the complexities of the Blogger platform. If you are just beginning to use Blogger of have been using it for years. My brother and I both use it for our blogs in entirely different ways and this book covers both of those methods in varying detail.

The stand-alone Blogger is the most typical and therefore the most completely covered. From the simplest aspects of creating the blog to methods of Search Engine Optimization, the explanations are concise and a great improvement upon the useless instructions given on the help section of the Blogger website. My brother scanned the book and found four, quick to implement improvements he could easily add to improve his site.

If you are doing self-hosting, you should consider another book. I am not sure whether an adequate instruction book exists for this type of Blogger usage, but this is not the one. It has only 4 pages of information on this method. All in all, this is a great book for the vast numbers of Blogger users and I highly recommend it.