Datasheet

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Chapter 1: Discovering Blog Basics
needed a printing press and a distribution method to get his or her work to
people, but he or she still needed specialized skills and technology.
Unless the would-be publisher spent time figuring out how to use HTML,
owned a computer that had an Internet connection, and understood how to
put files onto a Web server, he or she was still pretty much in the same can’t-
get-published boat. You could acquire those skills and the tools to publish,
but you couldn’t do so terribly easily.
The answer, as it turns out, comes down to technology — specifically, soft-
ware. I believe blogging goes a long way toward making that initial promise of
the Web come true. If you can write an e-mail, you can figure out how to use
the simple interfaces of blogging software without any of the muss of dealing
with HTML, FTP, or any of those other awful Web acronyms everyone’s sup-
posed to understand these days.
Figure 1-11 shows the publishing interface of Blogger (www.blogger.com),
a great blogging software tool. To write a new post, you simply log in to
Blogger, fill in the blanks for a new post, and click the Publish Post button to
put the entry on your blog.
Figure 1-11:
You can
publish a
blog by
simply fill-
ing in a few
form fields
and click-
ing Publish
Post.
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