Creating a Blog on Blogger.comPeople who contribute to their own blog are often referred to as bloggers. This term also serves as the basis for a popular blog service called Blogger, located at http://www.blogger.com/. This is the service I focus on throughout the remainder of this hour as I show you how to create your own hosted blog, customize it, and then link it in to your existing web pages. Incidentally, I'm not in any way connected to the folks at BloggerI just happen to find it to be one of the better blog services out there. You may also want to consider one of the following blog services, which all are also free and offer generally similar features as Blogger:
Getting back to Blogger, you can use the service to create a free blog that is entirely hosted by Blogger. You don't have to create or otherwise publish any pages of your own to use a blog on Blogger. The first step in using Blogger is to create an account by visiting http://www.blogger.com/signup.gbe sure to include the .g at the end of the URL. Follow the instructions to create your free account. Figure 21.2 shows how to enter the basic account information in Blogger. Figure 21.2. Creating a Blogger account primarily involves establishing a username and password, and providing your email address.Click Continue to continue along in the blog creation process. Figure 21.3 shows how you enter the title of the new blog, along with the name that is used in the URL of the blogthis address is what you enter into a web browser to access the blog. Figure 21.3. Specifying the blog title and address is an important part of the blog creation process.
Click Continue once more to proceed to the next step in the blog creation process. Figure 21.4 shows the selection of the blog template, which is required initially even though you will be changing the template code later in the hour. Figure 21.4. You must initially select a blog template, although you'll be customizing the CSS template code a little later in the lesson.Click Continue to accept the template and move on to wrap up the creation of the blog. You'll see a confirmation screen with a Start Posting link that you can click to post your first blog entry. |