Blogware comes with a number of built-in "themes" which define the font and color scheme of your blog. Some of them are quite nice. Others don't really appeal to me.

If you're a do-it-yourself type of person who also has a Blogware blog, you'll eventually want to create your own custom "look" for your blog. That's what the next few Blogware Mechanic articles will be about. By the end of this series, you should be quite comfortable with making changes to the look and feel of your blog by making changes to the style template. Read the article 

Some more Katrina-related blogging stories:

• Washington Post: Blogs Provide Storm Evacuees with Neighborhood-Specific News
  
  
• eWeek: An article about Michael "The Interdictor" Barnett (whom we covered earlier): Former Green Beret Stays Online in Katrina's Wake
  
  
• San Diego's North County Times: Web Sites Come of Age in Times of Trouble
  
  
• Ernie the Attorney is the blog of a New Orleans-based lawyer. Ernie has evacuated to Houston, where he's been posting a number of Hurrican Katrina-related entries.
  

He's been at it for a month, but just in case you hadn't heard, The Donald has his own blog, called -- as one might expect -- The Trump Blog. Its subtitle: "Ideas and opinions from Donald Trump and his circle of experts". As Jupiter Research's Michael Gartenberg says, this means that blogging is pretty mainstream now.

From an article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's site:

Blogging is helping students to think and write more critically, says an Australian researcher, and can help draw out people who would otherwise not engage in debate.

These are the preliminary findings of PhD research by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, who has been using weblogs or blogs in her own teaching since 2001.

"[The students] are thinking more critically," she says. "They are learning to be responsible and they're communicating outside the boundaries of the classroom and the institution, and they like that."

Brendan Loy, a second-year law student at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in his blog, The Irish Trojan's Blog (which I linked to earlier) on August 26 at 1:57 p.m.:

At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans. Such a scenario is unlikely -- the conditions would have be just right (or rather, just wrong) -- but IMHO, it's not nearly unlikely enough to feel good about things. If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of dodge right now, just in case. Once the evacuation orders are issued, if it comes to that, it'll inevitably be an absolute madhouse, despite officials' best efforts. (More here.)

Later, at 11:22 p.m., he wrote:

"I'm not a meteorologist. I'm just an amateur weather enthusiast, a law-student blogger who happens to be a hurricane buff. But if I lived in New Orleans, I would definitely leave at this point. Tonight. Barring a major change in the forecast, I expect the evacuation orders to come tomorrow. That will produce massive traffic jams and general confusion. My advice? Beat the rush; get out now. For it is imperative to get out. Katrina probably won't destroy New Orleans -- but it could. So if anyone in New Orleans is reading this, I'd personally advise you to get the hell out of dodge."

Over the past few days, Loy's blog has been one of the best non-news-media sources of meteorological information on Hurricane Katrina. It's become one of the most popular blogs over the past week, having been linked to by blogosphere heavyweights like Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds and Mickey "Kausfiles" Kaus. The past few days' entries on his blog are a fascinating transcript of Katrina's progress.

The New York Times has run a story on Loy and his blog: "Weather Nerd" in Indiana Warned New Orleans Mayor.

The most fascinating blog to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is Michael "The Interdictor" Barnett's blog, in which he documents what's happening in New Orleans from the 10th floor of a downtown New Orleans building. Barnett is the "crisis manager" at the domain name registrar DirectNIC, which shares its space with its sister company, Zipa, and in a prior life, he was a soldier in the U.S. Army Special Forces seem to have served him well. He's been helping keep the company's servers up and running since the start of the storm last week and blogging about his experience. It's a fascinating read, and I suggest you read it from his first Katrina entry, which simply reads:

Hmm. This could actually be a nasty storm.

Wired has a short piece on Barnett.