Integrating a Blogger blog within your website or web application

Every business that has a presence on the web, more or less, wishes to have a blog on their website. A blog allows a business to connect with its existing and potential customers informally. While it a fairly simple and straightforward to register an account on any of the free blogging websites, there are several issues that arise:

1. The blog and hence the entries would be stored on the blogging website's servers - sometimes businesses may not like this and would want more control over their proprietary posts, particularly those that are knowledge-oriented.
2. The blogging websites provide free skins/themes, however, a business website would want the blog to rhyme with their website's default skin/theme.

A possible solution would be to look for an open-source Blog application and integrate it with your website or web application. This would resolve both issues but the onus and responsibility of maintaining the Blog application would rest on the website administrator/developer. Basically, flexibility with a price tag!

Fortunately, there exists a better, second solution - one that comprises the best of both worlds. In short: flexibility with no price to pay for it.

The free blogging website - Blogger.com - allows publishing and archiving your blog/blog entries on your own hosting server/account as well as to customize the blog to reflect the skin/theme of your choice.

The first thing to do is register an account to create a blog - for more information on this, visit the Blogger homepage

Next, log in and from the Blogger Dashboard, click on 'Settings'

Then, click 'Publishing.

Put information such as the hosting server's FTP address (1), the URL of the website from where the blog will be accessed (2), path of the folder within the root folder of the hosting server/account (3), filename with which the blog will be accessed (4), Feed filename (5), FTP Username (6) and Password (7). For Blogger help on this, visit this link

Save these settings.

Blogger will now let you publish posts, comments, etc directly to your host rather than hosting it itself.

The second issue requires a bit of work and entails having knowledge of HTML, CSS and some Javascript. This is because Blogger does not allow WYSIWYG layout customization for blogs hosted on outside servers.

The trick is to choose one of the default available skins/themes and then hacking your way into it to your website's default skin/theme. One thing to be wary of while doing this is the Blogger Template tags (that look something like this: <$BlogPageTitle$>). Blogger tags act like placeholders for various things such as your posts, comments, title, etc, the content of which can be administered from the Blogger Dashboard.

Besides this, any HTML/CSS/Javascript can be modified, removed, added to change the look-and-feel of your blog.

To do this, click on 'Template' from the Dashboard and choose 'Edit HTML' option.