Audience for This Book

If you want to know how to start and run a blog, this book is for you. You can quickly learn which blogging system is right for you, and then you can soon run your first blog.

If you already run a blog, you may still be able to learn about desktop clients in Chapter 2 or learn more about your chosen blogging system from the later chapters. We've tried to provide you with the information you'd have otherwise spent a year learning. We do not cover every feature of every blogging tool exhaustively, so if you've been using and customizing your blogging environment for a long time, you probably know everything we say and more.

You don't have to be a power user to run your own blog. The software described in this book runs the gamut of complexity, from Blogger (no deep computer knowledge required) to Blosxom (designed for Unix tinkerers and experimenters).

You don't have to be a Unix guru or own a PC. There are blogging systems that run on Windows, Macintosh, and Unix machines. None of the systems we describe in this book require guru-level knowledge of the operating system to install, configure, or use.

Although some systems attempt to hide it from you, blog posts are eventually turned into HTML. Most blogs let you write and edit HTML. However, this book doesn't cover how to design in HTML. For more information on HTML, we recommend Learning Web Design, by Jennifer Niedherst (O'Reilly).

To benefit from this book, all you need is interest, enthusiasm, and some basic technical know-how.