Publishing a Blog with Blogger

Publishing a Blog with BloggerI just received my copy of Elizabeth Castro's book "Publishing a Blog with Blogger" from Amazon. It's one of the Visual Quick Project series of books published by Peachpit Press. It's a slim volume at just over 120 pages but is in full colour and VERY easy to follow. It covers all the basics of setting up a blog but also goes on to look at more advanced stuff like modifying the template, adding your own links to the sidebar and hosting the blog yourself. This latter option looks quite interesting - I must investigate.

This is a new book (published this year) but inevitably it is already out of date. It was published before Blogger introduced image file uploads. The book describes the process of uploading a file to your own server space using FTP and then linking to it from your blog. Fortunately, this is no longer necessary because you can now upload images to blogger and host them there directly from the Compose interface. Despite this, the book is a very handy guide to working with Blogger and will form a useful reference.

On the subject of images, it's worth pointing out that Blogger allows for up to 300MB of space for image file uploads. This is excellent news but I have discovered that because the Blogger upload automatically resamples images on-the-fly, it's difficult to control the quality of the posted images. If image quality and size flexibility is an issue, hosting ones own images is still the best way to go. In that respect, the books coverage of this method is welcome.

There is a website to accompany the book and it includes some useful stuff but has yet to include an update on the image upload thing

Interestingly, the book cover shows a photograph of the London Eye. Not sure what this means but I like it.

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