Hello, readers. You seem to be sending me a lot of e-mail lately. Fortunately, my spam sorter takes care of most of it, but a substantial stream of questions and comments keeps pouring in, inscrutable character sets and all. I wish they were all as eloquent as this one:

Paul Loved your articel! I have a few question. 1 How to setup? thanks.. derek meatburp

…but lately there have been more than a couple asking how to implement what’s apparently a very desirable feature — a little display of how many users are currently accessing a site. Of course there are dozens of pre-packaged scripts to do this, but, just because I love you all, let’s take a walk through a couple of ways to build this sort of feature from scratch. We’ll use PHP, the popular and friendly scripting language, for our examples.

You recently decided hosted blogging is for the birds. You want more control over your blog’s setup. In fact, you want total control over every last detail of your layout, functionality and design. So what do you do? Where do you turn?

One popular option is the Movable Type publishing system from Six Apart (other popular options include Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress). Movable Type contains pretty much everything you need to get your own site up and running, plus the flexibility to get really obsessive over the details. Also, with a little creativity and some community-created plugins, you can power much more than just a reverse-chronological list of blog posts.

This tutorial won’t go into the Movable Type installation process in-depth since there are many resources online already. What we’ll cover is the process of dressing up a vanilla Movable Type installation by customizing the look and feel of your new site. We’ll also get you started with some custom features by installing some plugins.

If you’ve taken the plunge into self-publishing, you’ve probably already learned that setting up a blog is the easy part. Tools like Blogger, TypePad and WordPress make it simple to set up your own site with just a few clicks.

It’s the next step — the branding, promotion and the actual writing — that’s the toughest nut to crack.

If you want your blog to hit the big time, you’ll need to dress up your site’s public presence. Here are Webmonkey’s tips for what you’ll need to play with the big boys and girls of the blogosphere. Soon, you’ll be swapping political commentary with DailyKos, and CoolHunting will be linking to you.