When we thought of teaching someone how to create a blog, I thought "What better way than writing a blog about it?"
What follows is a step by step walkthrough of how to create your very own blog, right here on Blogger.
Now, before we get started, all of this is much easier if you have a GMail account. If you have one, drop by
GMail and sign in. If not, go ahead over to
GMail and we will get you set up with one quickly.
Setting up a GMail account is easy and can be done in just a few steps. When you arrive at GMail, click on the "Create A New Account" link and you will see a screen that lays out as follows:
The first thing you will need to do is drop by
Blogger.com. You should see the following when you get there:
Now that we have a Gmail account, we can use it to sign in and create our blog. Once we sign in, we should see a screen like this one:
Once we pick out a name, a URL and type in that crazy set of letters that looks like a two-year old wrote them, we click on continue and get to another screen:
After picking out a basic theme, we can click continue. That will get the blog setup and give you this "Congrats" screen:
And there we go. Your blog is created.
But who wants just the generic layout of a blog? There are plenty of options to customize your blog to the way you would like it and we can get to that by clicking the "Customize How Your Blog Looks" link.
The first thing we come to is a template enhancement. Here you can change the way your blog looks in various layouts. The top of the panel shows you the options available while the bottom will show you how it will look if you use that layout. The real time look gives you a lot of comfort towards choosing the right layout.
Once you have the template you want, click the red Apply to Blog button and then click "Back To Blogger" and we can take a look at writing your first post.
First of all, get comfortable with your "Dashboard". From here, you can go just about anywhere you want to go, but for now we will take a look at writing a new post. Your dashboard should look like this:
Writing a post is fairly simple and comes together pretty easily. You can enter a title at the top of the screen and then type your post in the "Compose" window below. Here is what you should be looking at:
See all those fun little things at the top of the Compose Box? That's where we can add some color and flare to our post. We can make words bold or italicized as well as change the colors. The next icon, the one that looks like a globe with a paperclip on it, (this one:
) - that makes text that you select into a hyperlink. So, if I wanted you to read about my baseball blog, I could tell you to
click here and it would take you there. Notice in the screen shot below that the text I want to become a link is highlighted and the entire URL, including http:// is included in the box.
Continuing across the top bar, we have buttons that change the alignment of the text (left, centered, right and justified), create a numbered list, create a bullet point list, insert text that is a block quote and one that will launch the spell checker.
This is an example of text that has been inserted into a block quote using the quotation mark button above.
The next button (this one:
) is how we insert a picture into the blog. When you click that button, the first message you get is this:
From there, we will need to Browse for a picture on your computer and upload it. When you choose to upload you will get this screen letting you know it is working:
Once it is loaded, you should see this and you simply need to click "done"
Now, this part can be tricky, but Blogger likes to load your pictures at the top of your post and you want to move them where you want them. The easiest way to do that is to click on the "Edit HTML" tab at the top of your screen and dig into the code. It looks crazy, but it is really easy. You need the code that is highlighted in this screen shot (it starts with "
":
Now, we want to "cut" that by right clicking and choosing cut, and then we want to paste it where we want the picture. In my case, I want it right where you see it in the next screen shot, which puts the little icon in the sentence you read a few paragraphs back.
Back to the Compose screen and your picture is added.
The next button is to add a video, and you have to have that on your hard drive to upload. Be careful with this one, you do have to own the copyright for the video you are uploading.
The final button will remove formatting, which can be handy if you are copying text from another website or another program.
Last, but not least, we would like to point out "Gadgets" to you. We will not go in depth with these, but we will give you a brief look at them.
"Gadgets" are small programs that run on your blog that provide different information to your visitors. For this example, we will add a counter to the top of this blog.
First, we need to go to the design tab, which should show you something similar to this:
We are going to add a Gadget right at the top or our page, so we want to click on the link that says "Add A Gadget" right below the title of the blog. From there, we will get a list of gadgets available.
Blog stats is the one we want to use, so let's click on the plus sign to get this screen:
After making the choice of what you want the counter to look like, you can click "Save" and it will be on the page. You can see it in your layout now when you look at the design page again:
Now we click "Save" and our blog is updated with a counter at the top (you can see it if you scroll to the top of the page).
Feel free to add a few more gadgets and write your first post while you are here in class so that we can answer any questions you might have.
I hope you all enjoyed the class and I hope I provided you with enough information to get your own blog started. Please, feel free to leave your link to your blog in the comments below and let me know what you thought of the class as a whole.
Good luck and happy blogging.
