Thursday, November 18, 2004

Creating a blog Part 3

Previous posts in this thread are:
Part 1
Part 2

If you have followed the instructions in Part 1 and 2, then you will have a functioning blog and be able to post entries to the blog.

I am going to walk you through making those entries and some of the tips and tricks to that.

First of all go to www.blogger.com and log in using your user name and password.
The first screen you will come to is your dashboard, and it will contain a few elements. The left hand side will show all the blogs that you own or are a contributor to. If this is your very first blog then you will only see one.
There are 4 hyperlinks for each blog. The first and the last are the same and are the underlined name of the blog and the underlined number of posts. Clicking either of these will take you to the edit posts section.
The green plus sign is a hyperlink to create a new post, and the blue cog sign is a link to take you to the settings section. We will look at editing posts and altering settings later. For now just click on the green plus symbol to create a new post.

By the way the term "post" refers to the activity of posting or publishing an article on the world wide web. In effect as soon as you do you are a digital publisher. Each article you write and publish is called a post.

In the create post page you will notice a number of elements. First there are a set of "tabs" that identify the various tools available to you. The top set of tabs are Posting, Settings, Template and View Blog. You are currently in the Postings tab.
In this there are three tabs, Create, Edit Posts and Status. You should be in the Create tab. We will deal with the others later.

Up the top right hand side there are some additonal links, Back to Dashboard, Help and Sign Out. These should be self explanatory. The help is a substantial collection of how-to and help documents to help you get more out of Blogger. Search through the collection with Article Search (to the right) or send an email to the Blogger support team and they'll get back to you ASAP. I can vouch for them doing this - I have sent numerous emails over the last year and have been responded to professionally and promptly each time. They have also solved all my problems. Hopefully you won't need them but take comfort that it is there if necessary.
I am also happy to answer any technical (or seemingly stupid) questions you may have.

Ok on to posting.
1. You should see a Title Box. If not don't worry, we will deal with that later when we get into the settings and tweak them. If you do, type a title for the article in the box, else move on to the next section.

2. In the main article box below you can type or paste text in from another application, eg a text editor or word processor. A warning if you use paste from a word processor that special chacters such as dashes, apostrophes, ampersands and quotation marks may not transfer correctly due to automatic formatting in the word processor. I solve this by going through after pasting and deleting them and retyping them.

3. Format text how you want, change font, colour, bold and italic etc. as required.
Use the buttons on the toolbar in the middle of the page for that.

4. Preview your result by clicking the review link on the top right hand side of the text area. (end of toolbar).

5. Either Save as Draft or Publish by clicking the buttons below. In this case if you are happy wih the result then just click Publish.

6. The page should refresh a couple of times as it publishes the article and then finish up with a message of "Your blog published successfully"

Thats it.

If you have errors then please check blogger help (or email me if necessary). I will deal with troubleshooting errors later on.


Posted by: Jethro | 11:15 PM |