I’m quite excited to see that a team of talented blog designers (Phil Sherry, Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Michael Heilemann, Drew McLellan, David Powers, Chris J. Davis and John Oxton) have just announced their new book titled Blog Design Solutions.
I’m not familiar with all of the authors but those that I know have great blogs and know what they are talking about – I’ll definitely be getting myself a copy as I’m a complete dunce when it comes to blog design and I can use any tip I can get.
The blurb at Amazon on the book says:
“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 — 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!”
Pre Order your copy at Blog Design Solutions (affiliate link).
A PHP/MySQL-based blog engine.
I’m already doing that with one of my domains and can say that this book would probably offer some useful advice in that regard, but will need to read it to properly review.
It helps to know at the very least “basic HTML”…and taking that a step further to PHP is a big bonus in today’s world. ; )
Pity there isn’t a table of contents..
John Oxton’s website
Looks good
If you have got WordPress, no need to go into the intricacies (and pains) to build up your own blog engine, why reinvent the wheel?
[…] UPDATE (09.02.2006): А тем временем появились даже специальные книги, которые рассказывают про то, каким должен быть дизайн блога. […]
Thanks for posting about the book, Darren. Thought I’d point out a quick correction – Drew wasn’t able to contribute to the book (blame Amazon.co.uk for the misleading information) instead I helped out. In fact I wrote the ‘build your own blog engine’ chapter. Kashif says ‘why reinvent the wheel’ and it’s a valid point, but the real answer is ‘because it’s fun’ and it’s also a good way of learning PHP and MySQL as well as giving you full control of how your blog works.