What to Get Your Blogger for Christmas

December 1st, 2005 at 8:00 am (Blogging)

So that certain someone in your life has become obsessed. Several months ago, he (or she) started using a word you’d never heard before. Blog this, blog that. You ignored it, thinking it would go away, but now, it’s a full-on obsession, and as much as you’d like to, you can’t escape it.

Yet you still like this crazed person and you want to get them something he’d appreciate for Christmas.

So what do bloggers want for Christmas? Here’s a few ideas:

Some bloggers blog using free platforms (think of them as software programs like Microsoft Word, but for blogging, and they reside on the web instead of on your computer). More serious bloggers, though, use a more serious platform like Movable Type or WordPress. Your blogger’s site will usually indicate which one they’re using, somewhere toward the bottom of the page or one of the sidebars. For example, you can tell from the very bottom of my site that I blog using WordPress.

Like most technology, most users only understand and use a small percentage of the technology’s capacity (brains fall into this category as well), so there’s always more to learn. Here are a couple of books you can get your blogger that will interest him or her:

Key to both Movable Type and WordPress is a basic understanding of the PHP programming language. Here are a few ideas on that subject:

One of the coolest things you can do to make your blog snazzy is to learn and use Macromedia Flash. It’s part of a larger product suite called Macromedia Studio 8 Win/Mac. But it’s quite expensive. Okay, really expensive, even in pieces:

But there are always gift certificates, and you could always get them a book that they could use along with a free trial to see if it would be worth the investment:

Any other bloggers out there have suggestions for a blogger’s wish list?