Chapter 6. Advanced Blogger

Blogger's primary advantage is its simplicity ? if you accept the default settings and host on BlogSpot, you can be up and running within five minutes. Once you have your blog, you'll find it's just as easy to customize it.

You can begin with any one of the built-in templates, and then you can change the fonts, colors, layout, and order of contents. Also, you can start without technical embellishment and add comments, web statistics, and support for RSS and other specialized XML. If you host your pages, you can integrate your blog into your preferred development environment by converting the standard HTML output of Blogger into your preferred application type, such as ASP or PHP.

In this chapter, we cover some features specific to Blogger Pro. We take a look at some of the most popular customizations for Blogger, including template customization, adding comments, and statistic reporting. In addition, we discuss blog modifications you can make to integrate your blog into an external application environment, as well as generating RSS for participation in aggregation.

Though most of these changes can be applied whether your blog is hosted on BlogSpot or not, the examples are demonstrated with a blog that's hosted on an individual server. In addition, all the examples are also demonstrated with Blogger Pro. We note any dependencies based on Blogger version location.