HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Blogging has grown tremendously in recent years to become an important
channel for people to develop and share content on the Web. Modern blog-
ging sotware, such as WordPress and Movable Type, go beyond the posting of
articles and comments with powerful content-management capabilities. Major
media websites are powered by blogging sotware.
Blogging can be experienced in two ways. If you run your own blog, you
have complete control of a website, including its structure, appearance, and
operation. As the owner, you have administrator privileges, including the
ability to add other users to your blog in various roles. Posting privileges vary
according to the user's role. Administrators, editors, and authors can publish
articles on a blog. Contributors can submit articles that are then approved by
an editor or administrator for publication. Blogs can also have subscribers.
hese are registered users who, depending on the sotware, may be allowed to
comment on articles and see private posts.
A number of blogging services provide almost all the functionality of run-
ning your own blog, but without the monthly hosting fees and administrative
responsibility of maintaining your own website. hese services include Word-
Press.com, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, and others. hey make
it easy to publish content on the Web while limiting some of the functional-
ity you would have if you owned the website. WordPress.com, for example,
does not allow JavaScript and limits the content management functions. And
although you can put CSS rules into individual HTML style attributes in a
post, you must pay a small yearly fee to be able to edit the global CSS style
sheet and give the site your own look.
Whether you run your own blog, use one of the blog hosting services, or
have posting privileges on someone else's blog, Web-based blogging sotware
usually provides a post editor that accepts input in two modes: a visual, what-
you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) mode and an HTML source edit mode.
Figure 4.6 shows the post/page editor in WordPress in the visual editing mode.
his editor is called TinyMCE. It is a free, open-source, JavaScript-based editor
for HTML from Moxiecode.com. Its extendibility and easy integration into
other web sotware make it a popular editor for blogs and other content man-
agement systems.
he two tabs in the upper right of Figure 4.6 labeled Visual and HTML are
for switching between the two editing modes. Below those tabs is a double-
row toolbar with buttons for creating strong and emphasized text (the
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