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By this point in the book, you should know more than enough about blogging to decide which solution to investigate. Obviously, if you bought this book, you’ve decided that you’re ready to enter what some see as a world of pain and get your hands dirty with some code.

The next step is deciding which of the current blog engines you’re going to fire up. Over the course of this book, you’ll learn about Movable Type, Expression Engine, WordPress, and Textpattern. In the final chapter, Richard Rutter will take the more adventurous of you through coding your own blogging system.

Through the use of tags, you know how to get your blog noticed, and by embedding your Flickr images in your blog, you’ll have even more people flocking to your new blog.

Before you even touch any code, though, it makes sense to get yourself a testing server that we’ll use to run all the examples in this book. So, without further ado, it’s over to David Powers, who will guide you through how to set your machine up for that very job.

In writing this chapter I have really only skimmed over the top of the capabilities of TxP. It was more difficult deciding what not to tell you as opposed to what to cover. In writing this chapter, if I have achieved nothing more than giving you a little confidence to go off and explore the possibilities yourself, then I achieved my goals. Happy blogging!

Hopefully, this chapter has given you a brief overview of how to create a custom blog design from scratch and then turn that design into a Movable Type-powered blog. The whole project took a couple of weekends, so it’s a little more involved than using a hosted solution. However if you enjoy messing around with design and code, it’s a lot more fun. Also you’ll end up with your own distinct-looking blog rather than a cookie-cutter design.

I tried to keep the templates as simple as possible and hope they will provide you with a starting point for more customization and experimentation. Looking at other people’s blogs should give you plenty of inspiration, as should looking at the plug-in directory. Some of the plug-ins you’ll definitely want to look at include MT-Blacklist for comment spam control and Markdown for easier entry markup.

Quite a few bloggers publish a list of interesting links as well as their main posts. You can do this quite easily by setting up a very basic second blog and then using a plug-in such as Multiblog or Otherblog to bring those links into your main blog. If you’re looking for a project to test out your new Movable Type skills, this is a good place to start.

Grab your tea and treat yourself to another cookie because I’m about to massage your ego. If you have followed this chapter religiously, you will have ridden a very steep learning curve, coming to grips with the power of content management over traditional static page building. The CSS techniques you employed are great foundations for further exploration, and you should now be in a position to begin experimenting with your own style combinations to further customize your pages.

Most importantly, you have a very sexy blog—or at least the beginnings of one. What’s more, you opted to build it with the most malleable, well-structured blogging tool available. You’ll never look back and I predict that in a short time you will be shuffling stuff around your templates like peas around your plate. Enjoy your blog.

Congratulations! You should now be well on your way to mastering the theme system in WordPress. We sincerely hope that by now you are starting to see the power and flexibility available to you. With a little (or a lot of) CSS know-how you can make some spectacular designs. But remember this is just the tip of the iceberg. When you feel comfortable with the lessons learned in this chapter, hit up the Codex: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons#Designing_Your_WordPress_Site and stop by the WordPress IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, #wordpress. For instructions on how to use IRC, check out IRC Beginner: www.ircbeginner.com/.

Remember that personal publishing is about freedom—freedom to say what you want for the world to hear. Get to designing and join the global conversation.

In writing this chapter I have really only skimmed over the top of the capabilities of TxP. It was more difficult deciding what not to tell you as opposed to what to cover. In writing this chapter, if I have achieved nothing more than giving you a little confidence to go off and explore the possibilities yourself, then I achieved my goals. Happy blogging!

Grab your tea and treat yourself to another cookie because I’m about to massage your ego. If you have followed this chapter religiously, you will have ridden a very steep learning curve, coming to grips with the power of content management over traditional static page building. The CSS techniques you employed are great foundations for further exploration, and you should now be in a position to begin experimenting with your own style combinations to further customize your pages.

Most importantly, you have a very sexy blog—or at least the beginnings of one. What’s more, you opted to build it with the most malleable, well-structured blogging tool available. You’ll never look back and I predict that in a short time you will be shuffling stuff around your templates like peas around your plate. Enjoy your blog.