If..Else Log

If Blog Design Solutions was a football team, then it'll probably be Real Madrid; in the same way Real Madrid have managed to sign some of the Galacticos of the footballing world, BDS has managed to bring together some of the big names in the web design blogger circuit.

The likes of Michael Heilemann, John Oxton, and Simon Collison each take us on a guided tour of the major blogging platforms currently in favour. The old favourite of MT and current star WP are covered alongside other blogging choices such as EE and TXP. Rutter even gives us a glimpse of what it's like to roll your own custom CMS solution. So with such names on the front cover, what would the book be like?

After a short introduction, the book walks us through setting up your machine as a local test environment. Blogging is all about communication and sharing, and thus, rightly belongs out in the open but having a local sandbox for testing is an invaluable aid to development and experimentation. That said, the advent of easy to use web server distributions like Xampp are probably a better fit for most people but the chapter is a welcome one nonetheless.

The Blogs, Designs and Solutions

The subsequent chapters are each handled by a single author¹ talking about their platform of choice. Whilst each author brings their own flavour and writing style to the mix, each chapter broadly follows the same format. After a short discussion on setting up the software, a brief introduction to the templating engine followed by the development of a blog design. Following that, these ingredients are brought together to integrate the design with the templating tags to produce a custom blog theme. By the end of each chapter, the reader would have picked up enough to be able to, if not create their own theme, then at least understand how one is made up.

But for a but…

As I mentioned before, if Blog Design Solutions was a football team, then it'd probably be Real Madrid. And like Real Madrid, the combined efforts of the group of talented individuals, sadly, don't add up to the cohesive success that you may expect.

Upon reading the book, there's the unshakable feeling that each chapter had been written independently without knowledge or reading of the companion chapters. There's a strong sense of deja vu as you read about how to mark up and style a page. I suspect that the reader would have been better served if a single design was used by all the authors. As well as preventing the curse of unwelcome familiarity from distracting the reader's attention, it would have provided a better standing point from which to gauge and compare the workings of the different systems.

In fact, for a multi-format book, the lack of any significant comparison between the packages are a surprising omission. It would have been helpful to have seen a chapter dedicated to a more in-depth discussion on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of the contending solutions, especially since this was aimed at the blogging novice.

Perhaps, it's the format and constraints of the book which lets it down. By going for breadth in writing about 5 different approaches instead of focusing on one, the authors are unable to dig deep and illustrate the intricacies of each platform. A single chapter isn't really enough for the authors to get into stride and do each blog engine justice.

As a general overview and gentle introduction, the book has merits and if you're totally new to blogging, you'd probably find it informative. However, I can't help feeling disappointed, especially when you consider the depth and breadth of information that can be found on each of the author's blogs.

A quick 5 minute read in a book shop will probably be enough to tell you if this book is for you. However, if you already have your own blog up and running, I fancy that you probably won't find enough in here to satisfy you.

1. Apart from the WP chapter in which Michael and Chris both lend their expertise [back]

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