What this book covers
Chapter 1, An Introduction to Weblogs, gives you insight on weblogs and how they can be used to create a worldwide presence through the blogosphere. It also teaches you the difference between a blog and a CMS, the basics about newsfeeds and the important role they play for blogs, and how you can use them to spread information on the blogosphere.
Chapter 2, Installing Roller on Windows, teaches you how to install Apache Roller in a Windows environment, along with all the supporting software required—Apache web server, JDK SE 6, Tomcat servlet engine, and MySQL database server.
Chapter 3, Installing Roller on Linux, teaches you how to install Apache Roller in a Linux Ubuntu environment, along with all the supporting software required—Apache web server, JDK SE 6, Tomcat servlet engine, and MySQL database server.
Chapter 4, How to Start Working with Roller, teaches you the basics about blogging with Apache Roller, and how to manage the blogroll—an important element of every blog that shows up on the front page. You'll see how to create your first user and weblog, adjust basic settings of your server and weblog, create and edit weblog entries (posts), manage categories, use the Rich Text Editor included in Roller in order to enhance the appearance of your post, and maximize your front page's space by means of the Summary field.
Chapter 5, Spicing Up Your Blog, teaches you about all the different tools available on the Internet that can help you build a very attractive weblog for your visitors. You'll learn how to upload files to your blog and use the Rich Text Editor to insert images, sound files, and videos, change the file uploading size limit of your blog server in order to upload bigger files, and use Google Maps, YouTube, and SlideShare to embed maps, videos, and document presentations in your blog.
Chapter 6, Roller Themes and Blog Promotion, teaches you how to change your Roller weblog theme, download additional themes, and promote your weblog on all the popular bookmarking services. You'll learn how to choose a weblog theme from Roller's administration interface, download additional themes and install them in your Roller weblog server, create an account in No-IP.com—a dynamic DNS service provider—to run your Roller weblog from your own PC, open the web port (80) via port forwarding on your DSL modem/router firewall, and add a Digg It button to your weblog so that visitors can vote for your posts on the Digg.com social bookmarking website.
Chapter 7, Working with Templates, teaches you how to create and edit your first template in Roller, along with some basics about the Velocity template language, and how to create your first Roller theme from scratch. You'll also learn about Roller's model and data objects, and how to use these objects' properties, methods, and macros in a custom template to show data from your weblog.
Chapter 8, Comments and Trackbacks, will show you how to work with comments and trackbacks in your Apache Roller blog, using Roller's comment management tools to approve, disapprove, and delete comments. You'll also learn to moderate comments in Roller using comment management tools, avoid spam, and use all the anti-spam tools available in Roller, and how trackbacks can help you in interacting with other bloggers.
Chapter 9, Advanced Topics, will show you "some stuff" that will help in promoting your blog and creating your own weblog community. You will learn to manage group blogs, use aggregators and blog search engines, and configure Google webmaster tools to find out about visitors to your blog. You will also learn to use Google docs as a web client to publish entries, use podcasts in your weblog entries to attract visitors, and Planet Roller to aggregate external blogs along with your Roller blog.
Chapter 9 is not a part of the book, but you can download it from Packt's website. It is available at http://www.packtpub.com/files/9508-Chapter-9-Advanced-Topics.pdf.