Series: Beginning with Blogger

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MetaBlogging

Beginners’ Guide to Blogger: Sign Up

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Beginning with Blogger
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We’re going back to the basics for this next blogging series: I’m going to alternate weeks on Blogger and WordPress.com, and go back all the way to the beginning. I imagine you probably already have a blog, and you’ve probably been through all these steps, but you may know someone who’s interested in getting started, but afraid to try. Fear not! It’s easy! And if you want someone to show you what to do, look no further, because here’s the Beginniners’ Guide to Blogger, part one: how to sign up and set up your blog the first time.

Go to http://www.blogger.com. Here’s what the screen looks like:

If you already have a Google account—such as for Gmail, Google Groups or Orkut—you can use that to sign in at the top. Otherwise, click the big orange button to create an account.

Account creation is easy. You do have to supply some personal details—but nothing more intimate than your email address. You also set a display name here, the name that appears at the bottom of your blog posts. If you don’t want to use your real name, be sure to set that to your pseudonym of choice.

If you already have a Google account, when you sign in, you’ll see this. Click the blue button to create your blog:

Whether you just created a new account or are using an existing account, the next step is the same (You can click to enlarge the picture below). You select a name for your blog (what will appear in big letters at the top of every page) as well as its address. Note that there are no @ signs in the name of your blog—@ signs are only used in email addresses! Your blog address will be whatever you choose (if it’s available), followed by .blogspot.com —in the example here, it’s http://thisisafakeoblogo.blogspot.com. Use the “check availability” link to make sure that address isn’t already taken.

Type in the spam-catcher letters and click the orange Continue button.

Next, you get to choose the template or layout and colors of your blog. There are several choices here, so scroll down to see them all and pick the one you like best. (Note: in an upcoming post, we’ll talk about how to get custom designs for your Blogger blog.)

Voila! Your blog has been created! You can hit the orange Continue button here to start posting, or look at the Advanced Setup Options.

The advanced options allow you to get your own domain for your Blogger blog—i.e., ThisIsAFakeoBlogo.com instead of thisisafakeoblogo.blogspot.com. (Purchasing a domain will cost money. Here’s some of my advice on buying your own domain.) The other advanced option is to import a blog you already have into your new one.

If you went with the orange Continue button, you’ll go right to the Write New Post page. Enter a title in the title box—the title of the post appears at the top of the post in big letters. (This post’s title, for example, is “Beginners’ Guide to Blogger: Sign Up.”)

In the larger box below, type the words you’d like to see in the content or body of your post. (I’m pretty sure we’ll also be talking about what all those buttons do soon, too.)

To save the draft to finish later, or to make sure you don’t lose your work should your computer or browser crash, click the Save Draft button. To publish it to your public blog, click the Publish Post button. Once you publish, you’ll see this:

Follow the View Blog link to see your blog and your first post live in the world:

Congratulations! You just started a blog on Blogger!

What blogging topics would you like covered for Blogger or WordPress?

Categories
MetaBlogging

Beginning with Blogger: Posts and Pages

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Beginning with Blogger
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While this post is intended for beginners, there may be something for all of us here. Did you know that Blogger now has “Pages”? This is a very cool, very important step for Blogger as a “full-featured” blogging platform. You don’t have to cobble together a menu bar or touch HTML or flood your feed as you create “About Me” and “Contact” pages. (Check out the fourth picture and description for more details.)

All right, so we’ve created a blog with Blogger and even made our first post. Now we’re ready to learn a little more about posting. When you log in to Blogger and go to your blog, click on the Posting tab. You’ll see you have four sub-options.

The first, rather obviously, creates a New Post. We already went over how to create a post, so today we’ll look at the Post Options below the post text box. Click on the triangle to open the Post Options:

Here, you can switch off comments on a case-by-case basis. (In a few weeks, we’ll find how to turn off all comments automatically.) Unless you want to code your posts in HTML, keep the Enter HTML Line Breaks set to Press “Enter for Line Breaks. And if you’re not entering any HTML (for example, the code for others to copy and paste to use a badge), don’t worry about the Compose Settings.

The Post Date and Time has two options: Automatic, meaning it sets the date and time of the post to whenever you hit Publish, or Scheduled, meaning you get to pick the date and time displayed on the post. You can pick a time in the past to post-date a post, or you can pick a date or time to schedule a post to go live in the future. (When you click the button by Scheduled, a box pops up for you to enter the date and time you want.)

Finally, note here the Labels. You can use these to assign your posts to categories, and organize them for you and your visitors. You can have many, many Labels on a post, using them as specific “tags” so you can keep track of all the topics you mention, or you can stick to 5-10 or so Labels total, and use them as broad categories to organize your blog into general topics.

The next option under the Posting Tab is the Edit Posts option. This lists all your posts and drafts—and this is where to go to finish working on a draft post.

You can select some or all of your posts to add labels (with the drop down menu at left). You can also filter the posts you see by when they are or will be published: drafts aren’t scheduled to be published, Scheduled posts have been assigned a date and time and “published,” but aren’t visible on the blog yet, and Imported posts came from another blog (we’ll look at how to do that another week).

Warning: If you are saving draft versions of posts in Blogger, you may be publishing those posts to your RSS feed. When you publish the post later, it may not show up in feed readers again. So if you have a time-sensitive post (or just want to make sure your readers see your post when it’s ready, and only then), try using a test blog to draft, then cut and paste to your main blog. (I can’t find any documentation on this issue from Blogger, but I’ve seen this happen with half a dozen different Blogger blogs.)

On the line with the post, you can see the Title and the date or time (if recent enough) it was either published or last edited. To the left of the title is a little triangle—you can click on the triangle to see the text of the post without leaving this page. If a post has been published, you have the option to View just left of that. And left of that, you click Edit to finish or fix a post.

At the top, you can search in your posts or create a new post. At the bottom, you can publish or delete any of the posts you’ve selected with the check boxes on their lines.

The next option under the Posting Tab is the Edit Pages option. Pages are not like posts. Posts are little bits of time. They have dates and times attached to them. They’re your weekly/daily/whateverly updates. Pages are for the information that’s almost always going to stay the same on your blog: who you are, how to contact you, etc. My pages are displayed in a line underneath my header. (Home, Blog Mentoring, About, Contact, etc.)

You can have the same layout easily with Blogger. (This used to be a lot of work!) Click on Edit Pages to view the page menu. Here, you have the option to create a new page. Below that, any existing pages are displayed. Click on New Page to create a new page.

The Create a New Page page looks just like the create a new post page. Enter your title and text here, and click Publish Page to make it live.

If this is your first Page, Blogger will ask you where you’d like the list of your pages to be displayed on your blog. I highly recommend the Blog tabs option.

When you visit your blog, you can see the Pages listed below the header:

The last option under the Posting tab is Comment Moderation. All this has is a link to the Settings page for Comment Moderation:

And we’ll talk about that with other settings!

There you go—now you can save drafts, create new posts and create pages for your Blogger blog.

Anything need to be clearer?

Categories
Fulfillment

Living your dreams now

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Beginning with Blogger

Maybe I just follow too many fans of the Catholic Register (or just Jen at Conversion Diary), but I’ve heard such good things about Simcha Fisher. However, I don’t think I’d read anything by her until my dad sent me a link to her article “The Time to Thrive Is Now“:

Certainly the “trenches” of motherhood are a time of sacrifice, and a woman in that phase of life can drive both herself and her family crazy by trying to have the same lifestyle as her neighbor whose youngest child is 12. It would be hard for, say, a mom with a baby and a toddler to do everything on the list above. But I think we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and in many cases the message has morphed from “you shouldn’t try to do too much when you have young children,” to “you shouldn’t try to do anything when you have young children.” And I think that that’s a problem.

It’s definitely true that raising children is a bit time consuming 😉 . But I think Simcha is right—there perception in popular culture has shifted from “time consuming” to “all consuming.”

I am a mother. 24/7, always on call, never get a vacation mom.

But while my children are so much of my life—figurative and literally—I am still a person. I have three small kids, but I can do more than just change diapers, ready preschool books and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” (It’s a fave.)

I have dreams—the big one of writing, of course. In the last four and a half years, I’ve written seven novels (hoping to make that eight soon). While having one two three kids at home full time or nearly so. Some of my dreams will have to wait until my children are older—but my whole life doesn’t have to wait.

What are you doing to capture your dreams today?