So thanks again to Pearson Education for sending me books to review. This time it’s Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro by Canadian blogger Tris Hussey. It’s currently £10.26 on Amazon UK and has 272 pages.
Since, as you’ll have noticed, I’ve already created my own blog, I’m not exactly the target audience for this book. Nonetheless, this puts me in a good position to tell you whether the information it contains is useful or not. (Short version: it is).
This is a book of two halves. The opening chapters describe what blogs are, how to set one up, choose a name and what sorts of things you might write about. That sounds a bit vague, but actually Tris goes into a lot of detail on how to choose between different platforms and the intricacies of which settings to use. The emphasis is on a self-hosted WordPress platform, which is not the simplest choice but it is one of the most versatile, while remaining intelligible to normal people. That may well be a show-stopper for confirmed Drupal addicts and so forth, but then, they aren’t the target reader either.
The second half of the book runs through the aforementioned six projects. These are a personal blog, a business blog, podcast blog, photoblog, videoblog and lifestream. In each case, he runs through a content strategy – including employee and comment policies in the case of business blogs – and the specifics of what settings, themes and plugins you should get hold of to make a good fist of what you’re doing. There’s also plenty of examples of good (and bad) practise. Despite the broad scope, there’s plenty of detail for each of these case studies. I learned a lot about the areas that I haven’t spent much time on, and picked up useful tips for those I have.
Tris’ writing style is light and airy and – well – bloggy. That makes for an easy read, even when he’s describing which particular set of plugins work well for podcasting and how you should set them up. If you’re a corporate suit, then you might find it too casual – but let’s face it: you won’t read this review and you probably shouldn’t set up a blog. The structure of the chapters is blog-like as well, with lots of sidebars and boxouts with asides going into detail on some particular point of interest. A well-constructed index and table of contents means that these don’t get lost when you try to find them again. Tris also ‘links out’ a lot from the book, introducing me to a number of blogs that I hadn’t come across before that represent ‘best-of-class’ examples for a particular format.
When you buy the book, you get access to the complete e-book text online — which seems to have become the norm for technical books. I approve of this trend — it’s hard to follow the text in a book and type at the same time. Apparently, there was a companion blog to the book, but this now redirects to the appropriate section of Tris’ site – which remains a good source for blogging tips.
So a thumbs-up from me: it’s comprehensive and very readable and even very experienced bloggers will learn something useful or re-think some of their opinions.
Oh, and you can check out the opening chapter below to see if you like the style.
Sample Chapter from Create Your Own Blog (chapter 3)
picture credit: Mike Licht
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Hi Ian thanks for your review. I appreciate the time you took and I’m happy you enjoyed the book. Yes, I decided to redirect the book URL to a section of my main site, because I thought it would let me offer more content of interest to readers of the book than trying to manage several sites (including one for my next book).
Again, thank you for the review!
Hey Tris,
No problem. It’s a good book. Understand about the blog.
i own at least 3 video blogs and i love to video blog myself and do some crazy stuffs-.;