September 11, 2007

Blogging 101: Chapter Two-- Those Weird 'Blog' Thingies

Breakthrough-- After struggling for a long time to learn all the ins and outs of building, securing, uploading and maintaining my own site, I decided to look into blogging. I read a couple reviews and jumped in. I was surprised to have, not just one, but one blog on Blogger and one on Wordpress-- in less than an hour.

And they looked good. I realized-- duh!- blogs are just websites dedicated to automatically doing what I wanted to do-- to write on line.

I was doubtful. How could anything so easy be good?

I dove into Blogger.com first-- mainly because I'd recently begun using Gmail and liked it-- as well as Google's Picasa for editing and posting my photos on line. They are all part of Google, so I didn't even have to register-- just sign in.

I checked the list of templates, found one that I liked, previewed it and pressed 'save'-- simple, automatic. Next, I found that posting (writing an entry) was as easy as writing an email-- including adding photos and links-- it looked good. Finally I explored the tabbed 'dashboard' control center, and found it easy to understand. And for whatever I couldn't understand, I was able to locate plenty of help pages- including step-by-step tutorials.

Besides changing the template, fonts or colors, 'elements' can be added to customize the page. For example, I added a way for folks to get my updates by email (The small text link that I have on the left of my blog) and a link to allow folks to get my newest updates via a 'feed' to their, in my case, Yahoo home page or news reader (icon at left).

At last I had a fully functioning site and shared it with friends-- who promptly asked me to tell them how...

Next blog: Some Tips to get started

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