Geek Stuff: Blogging 101 - Setting up a blog

I showed a friend my blog, and she wanted to know how she can set one up. Another friend will be wanting the same information as well, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to run a series of tutorial postings here. There is a myriad of information out there in cyberspace that provides a lot of technical instructions. I am going to keep this series aimed at a novice, and put detailed technical titbits in new posts. This information is shows you how I do it, as many roads lead to Rome.

Begin at the beginning

I think Blogger (blogspot.com) is a really easy platform for a novice to house their blog. Blogger is a free Google web-based publishing service, and it’s intended to be easy for beginners (and is not limiting for advanced users). Blogspot is a free blog hosting service. Decide what you want to call your blog, then go to www.blogger.com

1. If you have a Google account, sign in by entering your email address and password in the upper right hand corner.
2. If you do not have a Google account, get started by clicking on the "Get Started" button.
3. You'll be taken to a screen that asks you to create an account. Here you will need to enter in your pre-existing email address (which doesn’t have to be a gmail email address), choose a password, choose the name that will be displayed when you publish a blog post and accept Blogger's terms of use.
4. You will next be asked to name your blog and choose your blog's URL address**.
5. Next you will be taken to a screen that lets you select a template for your blog's design. At this stage I would suggest you just pick any one of the templates (there are lots to choose from), and you can always change this later.
6. When you have chosen your template, you can start posting.

**URL address - Uniform Resource Locator (world wide web address). Since there are already a large number of Blogspot blogs, you'll need to possibly try a few different URLs before you find one that is available. Your blog's URL can only use letters, numbers, and hyphens. The format for your URL will be blogname.blogspot.com.