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The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog

Posted by Trevor in books on Jan 17th, 2006 | View Comments |

Rebecca Blood of Rebecca’s Pocket wrote this 200 page tome in 2002. I finished reading it in 2006. I would say about half of the information provided is dated or anachronistic. While her blog is full of interesting reading material for a technophile, the book needs a major overhaul.

Where is it useful? It’s filled with practical advice as the title suggests. Most of that practical advice is more related to being a decent human being than it is to blogging. The Weblog Handbook is a good read if you are ethically challenged or prone to getting into flame wars with other citizens of the virtual reality we called the Net. It’s a good read if you want to blog for the long term and aren’t sure what sort of writing will make people come back to visit you again and again.

What isn’t useful? Blogging is, like most new technology, a rapidly evolving animal, and this book should be updated annually to keep up with the state of the genre. Blogging is just now emerging as a serious alternative source of valuable information about the world. Also, if you’re looking for advice that will help you pick the best tool to blog with, this book is not going to help at all. In fact, no book will help much with that. A single author blog, in my opinion, here in 2006, should be written and published, in every case, with WordPress. It’s by far the most elegant tool out there.

The Weblog Handbook doesn’t mention either it or Movable Type, which is what Rebecca’s Pocket is based on.
If you need help figuring out how to blog in a civilized fashion, so that you will actually find and keep an audience, then The Weblog Handbook might need to go on your reading list. Other than that, I would say avoid this book unless it is re-released with more relevant information about the current state of blogging. Technology books have a very short shelf life.
Rebecca herself is a class act, and so is Rebecca’s Pocket. However, a major overhaul of The Weblog Handbook is long overdue.

See my other Amazon.com book reviews.

Updated! Rebecca read my review and noted that she has hand coded the site up until six days ago. I never visited her site during the hand coding days. Rebecca certainly practices what she preaches in the The Weblog Handbook and is a maven when it comes to dispensing sage advice regarding blogging etiquette.

I still believe that The Weblog Handbook would be a more useful tome if it included a chapter or two on current blogging tools and if it was updated annually or every other year.

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Dion

Cool...

Barb

This should be read by Jamal! :)

Rebecca Blood

Hi Trevor,

Thanks for the review. Just to be clear, I deliberately chose not to talk about blogging technology because that content will, as you point out, quickly go out of date. My book is about blogging, not about using software.

That decision surprised people at the time, some of whom expected it to be more of a technical manual. But of all the blogging books published that year, mine is the one that continues to consistently sell (and continues to be picked up for translation into other languages). So in retrospect, I believe I made the right choice.

Another reason, of course, is that I don't know blogging technology very well. As you rightly point out, I now us MT to manage my site -- and have for a full 6 days. Up until January 11 I hand-coded my site. And though I like the functionality MT provides, I'm still not sure how it meshes with my writing process. I'm reserving the right to go back to hand-coding at any time. :)