Using Blogger for Content Management
Despite the name, Blogger isn't just limited to blogs. It actually makesfor a nifty Content Management System (CMS) for a wide range of sites, including e-commerce, informational and educational sites.
I've found it to be an easy and inexpensive (well, free) solution for simple content management, albeit a comparatively inflexible one. You won't get the rich plugin library of blogging platforms like WordPress or CMS's like Joomla, Pligg or Drupal. But you will get the benefit of having a very fast setup time. I estimate once you get good at it, it only takes 15 minutes to be up and running with Blogger (not counting time developing the template of course).
If you already have an existing site layout, adding in Blogger functionality is a snap. Blogger uses special markup that is compartmentalized and easily pasted into an existing HTML layout.
Also, when deploying to your own web server, Blogger plays nice with with PHP. I'm not sure about other web languages such as ASP or Perl/Mason, but I imagine as long as it's an interpreted language, it should be fine.
Blogger is completely transparent to use. In other words, your users will have no idea you're using Blogger. One caveat: If you enable comments on your posts then it will be revealed when a user clicks to add a comment.
Setting up a Blog
You have three options for hosting the blog. You can get free hosting and a sub-domain at blogspot.com, for instance, thetruetribe.blogspot.com. Or, you can register your own domain name with Blogger for a small fee (e.g. thetruetribe.com). Or, if you already have hosting and a domain name with another provider, you can publish to that domain from Blogger.
By far, most people have a sub-domain at blogspot.com. But, except for personal blogs, this isn't really appropriate most of the time. Although I do see e-commerce sites have blogs at blogspot.com addresses, this is somewhat of a faux pas in my opinion.
One reason not to have your blog on a separate domain is that it divides resources. If you have both yoursite.com and yoursite.blogspot.com, the SEO will be twice as difficult as keyword relevance and backlinks will be split between the two web properties. From an SEO standpoint (and probably from a user's standpoint as well), it's ideal to have the blog or news page be on the same domain as the main site. You could also publish the blog to a sub-domain of the site, for instance blog.yourdomain.com, without ill effect.
My recommendation is to go for one of the other two options unless it's a personal site, as you will want to have a custom domain in order to rank well for SEO and also for users to be able to easily recall the domain and access it.
The second option, registering the domain through Blogger and having them host it, has the benefit that you get free hosting and can use their powerful XML templates. The XML templates were released in 2007 and seem to have been complete rewrite of their templating engine. You don't get this functionality when publishing to your own FTP site, so this is the best option if you want to fully utilize what Blogger has to offer. Blogger's XML templates allow easy drag-and-drop rearranging of widgets on the page, as well as a variety of built in widgets including RSS feed aggregators, image galleries and so on.
The third option, publishing to your own FTP site, is appropriate if you already have a domain name and hosting or if you wish to utilize the flexibility having your own hosting can give you. But, take note that you will be limited to only using "Blogger 1.0" templates, without any of the new XML features or widgets. Still, this is usually sufficient for simple content management.
Publishing Via FTP from Blogger
Here's a walkthrough to getting set up with Blogger on your own FTP server.
- Go to www.blogger.com and click "Create blog now"
- Don't bother filling out any of the information just yet. Instead, click on "Advanced Blog Setup"
- On the following page you can enter account details for your FTP server. You can choose what path and filename to publish to, as well as whether to publish using FTP or SFTP. You can choose to publish to a .html file (e.g. index.html) or a .php file if your hosting supports it.
That's it! Assuming all the details have been entered correctly, Blogger should be set up to publish files to your FTP server now. It will publish the main page at the URL you specified, as well as archive pages and individual "permalink" pages for posts.
Customizing the Blogger Template
After setting up the FTP details, The following page presents readymade templates for Blogger. I'll assume you already have a layout you'd like to use. If not, then now would be a good time to make one.
Since we don't need to use the template for any layout, CSS or HTML other than the Blogger-specific code, it doesn't matter a great deal which template you choose. But for now, just choose Minima, so we're working with the same code base.
Select Minima, continue, and publish a post (the obligatory "Hello, world!" of your new blog). The click on the Template tab to get down to business, cut-and-paste style.
The next step is to open up your layout file in the editor of your choice (I prefer SciTE and Aptana personally) and get ready to cut-and-paste.
The first tags to grab are <$BlogPageTitle$> and <$BlogMetaData$>, which output the title of your blog and hook up the RSS feeds, respectively. The <$BlogPageTitle$> tag can be outputted as the page title (i.e. in <title></title> tags) as well as the header, in an <h1>.
The resulting code should look like this:
<head>
<title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>
<$BlogMetaData$>
</head>
The <$BlogMetaData$> tag outputs a lot of good stuff including all flavors of RSS feeds (RSS 2.0, RSD, Atom).
Next, grab everything between and including the <Blogger></Blogger> tags. You'll want to paste this into the main wrapper of you site, where you want the dynamic content to be. This is typically something like <div id="main-content">. It's a lot of code to paste, and the indentation may be a bit off, but if you've correctly copied it, it should work fine.
As for styling, you can inspect the resulting HTML using Firebug and see the pre-defined classes. Or you can always add classes yourself to the Blogger code. Just make sure not to add any ids since the code will be repeated once for each post.
The Sidebar: Recent Posts, Archives, Profile
You may want to include archived posts, recent posts or your Blogger profile. It's quite simple, really. Scrolling down towards the bottom of the Minima HTML/Blogger tag source, you'll find an area marked with the comment "Begin #sidebar." Here is where we'll find the tags:
<$BlogMemberProfile$>
This one outputs your Blogger profile pic and description. Nothing too useful but I guess it's nice for a blog site.
<ul id="recently">
<BloggerPreviousItems>
<li><a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogPreviousItemTitle$></a></li>
</BloggerPreviousItems>
</ul>
This code outputs the recent posts, with links to their individual permalink pages.
<ul class="archive-list">
<BloggerArchives>
<li><a href="<$BlogArchiveURL$>"><$BlogArchiveName$></a></li>
</BloggerArchives>
</ul>
This code links to the archive pages.
Hopefully this post has proven helpful and will give you the confidence to publish your own Blogger-powered dynamically driven sites! It's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done and is a breeze to set up. Post comments with any other tweaks you've found or issues you run into. Blogger certainly has its shortcomings but for the price (i.e. free), I'm not complaining, and it does a lot of things right too.
Have fun and happy bloggin'!
Labels: cms
Despite the name, Blogger isn't just limited to blogs. It actually makesfor a nifty Content Management System (CMS) for a wide range of sites, including e-commerce, informational and educational sites.
I've found it to be an easy and inexpensive (well, free) solution for simple content management, albeit a comparatively inflexible one. You won't get the rich plugin library of blogging platforms like WordPress or CMS's like Joomla, Pligg or Drupal. But you will get the benefit of having a very fast setup time. I estimate once you get good at it, it only takes 15 minutes to be up and running with Blogger (not counting time developing the template of course).
If you already have an existing site layout, adding in Blogger functionality is a snap. Blogger uses special markup that is compartmentalized and easily pasted into an existing HTML layout.
Also, when deploying to your own web server, Blogger plays nice with with PHP. I'm not sure about other web languages such as ASP or Perl/Mason, but I imagine as long as it's an interpreted language, it should be fine.
Blogger is completely transparent to use. In other words, your users will have no idea you're using Blogger. One caveat: If you enable comments on your posts then it will be revealed when a user clicks to add a comment.
Setting up a Blog
You have three options for hosting the blog. You can get free hosting and a sub-domain at blogspot.com, for instance, thetruetribe.blogspot.com. Or, you can register your own domain name with Blogger for a small fee (e.g. thetruetribe.com). Or, if you already have hosting and a domain name with another provider, you can publish to that domain from Blogger.
By far, most people have a sub-domain at blogspot.com. But, except for personal blogs, this isn't really appropriate most of the time. Although I do see e-commerce sites have blogs at blogspot.com addresses, this is somewhat of a faux pas in my opinion.
One reason not to have your blog on a separate domain is that it divides resources. If you have both yoursite.com and yoursite.blogspot.com, the SEO will be twice as difficult as keyword relevance and backlinks will be split between the two web properties. From an SEO standpoint (and probably from a user's standpoint as well), it's ideal to have the blog or news page be on the same domain as the main site. You could also publish the blog to a sub-domain of the site, for instance blog.yourdomain.com, without ill effect.
My recommendation is to go for one of the other two options unless it's a personal site, as you will want to have a custom domain in order to rank well for SEO and also for users to be able to easily recall the domain and access it.
The second option, registering the domain through Blogger and having them host it, has the benefit that you get free hosting and can use their powerful XML templates. The XML templates were released in 2007 and seem to have been complete rewrite of their templating engine. You don't get this functionality when publishing to your own FTP site, so this is the best option if you want to fully utilize what Blogger has to offer. Blogger's XML templates allow easy drag-and-drop rearranging of widgets on the page, as well as a variety of built in widgets including RSS feed aggregators, image galleries and so on.
The third option, publishing to your own FTP site, is appropriate if you already have a domain name and hosting or if you wish to utilize the flexibility having your own hosting can give you. But, take note that you will be limited to only using "Blogger 1.0" templates, without any of the new XML features or widgets. Still, this is usually sufficient for simple content management.
Publishing Via FTP from Blogger
Here's a walkthrough to getting set up with Blogger on your own FTP server.- Go to www.blogger.com and click "Create blog now"
- Don't bother filling out any of the information just yet. Instead, click on "Advanced Blog Setup"
- On the following page you can enter account details for your FTP server. You can choose what path and filename to publish to, as well as whether to publish using FTP or SFTP. You can choose to publish to a .html file (e.g. index.html) or a .php file if your hosting supports it.
That's it! Assuming all the details have been entered correctly, Blogger should be set up to publish files to your FTP server now. It will publish the main page at the URL you specified, as well as archive pages and individual "permalink" pages for posts.
Customizing the Blogger Template
After setting up the FTP details, The following page presents readymade templates for Blogger. I'll assume you already have a layout you'd like to use. If not, then now would be a good time to make one.
Since we don't need to use the template for any layout, CSS or HTML other than the Blogger-specific code, it doesn't matter a great deal which template you choose. But for now, just choose Minima, so we're working with the same code base.
Select Minima, continue, and publish a post (the obligatory "Hello, world!" of your new blog). The click on the Template tab to get down to business, cut-and-paste style.
The next step is to open up your layout file in the editor of your choice (I prefer SciTE and Aptana personally) and get ready to cut-and-paste.
The first tags to grab are <$BlogPageTitle$> and <$BlogMetaData$>, which output the title of your blog and hook up the RSS feeds, respectively. The <$BlogPageTitle$> tag can be outputted as the page title (i.e. in <title></title> tags) as well as the header, in an <h1>.
The resulting code should look like this:<head> <title><$BlogPageTitle$></title> <$BlogMetaData$> </head>
The <$BlogMetaData$> tag outputs a lot of good stuff including all flavors of RSS feeds (RSS 2.0, RSD, Atom).
Next, grab everything between and including the <Blogger></Blogger> tags. You'll want to paste this into the main wrapper of you site, where you want the dynamic content to be. This is typically something like <div id="main-content">. It's a lot of code to paste, and the indentation may be a bit off, but if you've correctly copied it, it should work fine.
As for styling, you can inspect the resulting HTML using Firebug and see the pre-defined classes. Or you can always add classes yourself to the Blogger code. Just make sure not to add any ids since the code will be repeated once for each post.
The Sidebar: Recent Posts, Archives, Profile
You may want to include archived posts, recent posts or your Blogger profile. It's quite simple, really. Scrolling down towards the bottom of the Minima HTML/Blogger tag source, you'll find an area marked with the comment "Begin #sidebar." Here is where we'll find the tags:
<$BlogMemberProfile$> This one outputs your Blogger profile pic and description. Nothing too useful but I guess it's nice for a blog site.<ul id="recently"> <BloggerPreviousItems> <li><a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogPreviousItemTitle$></a></li> </BloggerPreviousItems> </ul>
This code outputs the recent posts, with links to their individual permalink pages.
<ul class="archive-list"> <BloggerArchives> <li><a href="<$BlogArchiveURL$>"><$BlogArchiveName$></a></li> </BloggerArchives> </ul>This code links to the archive pages.
Hopefully this post has proven helpful and will give you the confidence to publish your own Blogger-powered dynamically driven sites! It's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done and is a breeze to set up. Post comments with any other tweaks you've found or issues you run into. Blogger certainly has its shortcomings but for the price (i.e. free), I'm not complaining, and it does a lot of things right too.
Have fun and happy bloggin'!
Labels: cms
posted by Jonah Dempcy at
10:39 PM
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