'Weblog Handbook' slashdotted

Christian Crumlish

A positive front-page review of Rebecca Blood's Weblog Handbook at Slashdot generates a range of responses, most of which we've seen before from this quarter (weblogs are over, the writing is terrible/self-indulgent, who cares what you think, what's so hard about updating webpages, etc.).

Some choice comments:

Why would I care to read your stupid rantings? Why would I care to get my daily news from someone with as much authority on the 'news' as myself? Are we so in need of entertainment that our ravenous hunger for material has necessitated the development of individual publishing?

Same commenter:

Don't get me wrong, that individual publishing exist[s] is a beautiful, beautiful thing. However, the blog phenomenon is about as interesting as reading other peoples checkbooks.

Another:

Um, I was under the impression that "blogs" (what a stupid name that is) were trendy and cool four years ago, but are just derivative sources of meaningless drivel these days.
Do people actually still read and write these things?

This one made me chuckle:

Hey everybody - I'm working on a new book. It's called "The Slashdot Handbook: Practical Advice on posting comments and submitting stories to Slashdot". Please buy it.
Thank you.

The point is, blogging is simple. Its not more difficult than back in 1995 when we all posted our first kitty-kat pictures using notepad or VI. Writing good content for blogs is the hard part.

But this post I think best exemplifies the viewpoint of a technically savvy person who can't understand why the less technically inclined might benefit from tools, shortcuts, and advice:

I edit my weblog with nano. Granted, I also edit it live, which bothers people as a concept, but I ssh into my data area for my web site, "nano -w weblog.html", and type away. When a month's worth of entries are generated (on the calendar change) I roll the old weblog over to weblog-archive-year-month.html, and start a new weblog with a template for the headers, page formatting, etc, using cp. I then link the new weblog.html to the archive, link the archive to the new weblog.html, and add an entry to the archive list page. It takes ten minutes per month if I'm drunk off my ass and can't type.
I know that I'm not necessarily doing it the standard way, but HOW can one write a full sized book on weblogging?
Better yet, how can someone justify paying more than $0.50 for said book?