O'Reilly Network Weblogs
Updated September 13, 2004
Welcome to the O'Reilly Network weblogging system. This document answers many common questions that new webloggers may have -- however, if you ever need help or have questions, send mail to
and we'll be happy to help.
Creating and Managing Posts
To use your new Weblog, go to http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/home -- if you're not yet logged in, you'll be asked to do so.
To create your first post, click "Create a New Weblog Post" and fill out the form. Here's a summary of the fields you see and what they're used for:
Title: Title of your post.
Subject: You should associate your Weblog entry with one of the subject areas listed. If none of the subjects apply, choose "General". In addition to roughly categorizing weblogs, we use subject fields as a way to grab relevant weblogs to list in various places throughout the O'Reilly Network. For example, if you pick "Mac" as a subject (or secondary subject), your weblog will show up in the weblogs list on MacDevCenter.com.
Secondary Subjects: Sometimes more than one subject area applies -- in that case, you can choose one or more secondary subjects. For example, a post related to Airport cards might have Mac as the subject and Wireless as a secondary subject. This will cause it to appear on both MacDevCenter.com and the Wireless DevCenter.
Topics: If you select topics, they will be used in the keywords metatag for your post.
- URL: If your post is specifically about another web site or web page, you can enter the URL here, and it will appear at the top of your weblog post as a link
Status: While you're working on your weblog, you can leave it set to draft to keep it from being publicly available until you're done. When you're ready for your entry to public, mark it as Final.
Description: This is the short blurb that is used on various places on our site where we list weblogs, and also in the RSS feed. You can use simple HTML, like links, but we don't recomend that you try to do a lot of HTML formatting and such here.
Full Text: This field normally contains the main content of your post. If you leave this field blank, the Description field will be used in its place. You can use plain text or HTML. To include images, you'll need to upload them somewhere and then enter the image tags -- or you can send images by email to
and we'll upload them to our server and send you the image tags to use. In the future, we hope to provide a direct image upload feature. TalkBack Lead-in: Each weblog post has a discussion area where readers can comment or ask questions. This field allows you to add an invitation to them. For example, you could enter something like What have your experiences with the XYZ adapter been like?
Once you've created entries, you can continue to view and manage from the weblogger's home page. That page also includes a link to "Your Author Page (public url)" -- this is the link to use if you'd like to point someone to your O'Reilly writings. You can also get the public links to individual items directly from this page.
Making your post live
If your post is ready for the world to see, just change the status field to "Final". (Or just click on "Mark as Final". It will take up to five minutes for the record to update across the server cluster and appear on the web site and in RSS feeds.
Where does it show up?
Visitors to O'Reilly Weblogs will be able see all Weblog entries where the status has been set to final. Weblog entries also show up on the O'Reilly Network home page, on various DevCenters and sites throughout the O'Reilly Network, and in our RSS feeds. And, of course, it shows on your author page. (It may take up to four hours for your post to appear everywhere, but it should take less than ten minutes for it to appear on weblogs.oreilly.com and on O'Reilly Network home.
Weblog Licensing
We're supporting Creative Commons on several fronts, including licensing the content in the O'Reilly weblogs under Creative Commons' "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license.
We believe this new license will make it easier to get that content read by more people, while also protecting it appropriately. The license is noted on the main weblogs page.
Here's what the 'Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike' license permits:
Attribution. Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only if they give you credit. Noncommercial. Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only for noncommercial purposes. Share Alike. Permit others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
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