Section 182. Build a Blog Through the Wizard

182. Build a Blog Through the Wizard

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

181 Create an Account at Blogger.com

SEE ALSO

189 Edit Your Blog from the Dashboard

190 Add a Post

When you get your Blogger account, you can keep going to create your blog. Lets review a few points mentioned previously. After all, blogs take commitment. Are you committed to your subject and to checking your blog for responses? Have you outlined your writing before sitting in front of that lonely , blank, and very spacious text entry box? If so, proceed.

182. Build a Blog Through the Wizard

Also, in this section I will illustrate an advanced setup. I will use the Blogger website to prepare my blog. I will then have my blog sent to my website, for display there. Some people choose to do it this way. If you're comfortable with displaying your blogs on the Blogger site only, the FTP information is something you should skip.

1.	Name Your Blog In the Blog title space, name your blog. This is going to be the name that appears on the page and what people are going to remember. I am going to call my blog "Taco the Chook."
2.	Select the Advanced Setup Choice If you have a premium service such as GeoCities Pro and have an FTP address you can use for your site, you can host your blog yourself at your site. Because this choice allows you more options than if you host the site at Blogger.com, we are going to write the tasks to work with FTP hosting on your own site so that you can see all the options and learn how to use them. If you want to have Blogger host your page, simply enter a name for your page at Blogger.com and then click the Continue button. Remember that if you host your site at Blogger.com, some of the options we show in these tasks will not be available.
3.	Enter the Information on Your Blog and Your FTP Settings For the blog title, name your blog as you did in step 1. Unfortunately, when you switch to the Advanced Blog Setup , the name is not carried with you. Select whether you want your blog listed or not. Listing your blog will allow it to show up in the lists of blogs from Blogger.com. You might or might not want this link. You can always change your mind later, so for now choose to have your blog listed. In the Server Details section, you will need to add the FTP information for your site. Add the address for the FTP server and pick the protocol for the files to be sentselect FTP (not SFTP [ Secure FTP ], unless you have your server set to use SFTP ). The FTP path is used on some servers, but you shouldn't have to worry about that unless your service provider has given you that information. The wizard is going to create an actual blog page, so you need to specify the name for the page. I am calling mine blog.html . In the Blog URL field, you need to tell Blogger what you want the address to be. I am going to set mine to http://www.geocities.com/tacothechook/blog/ so that it has its own directory on my site. Click on Continue to move on to the template selection.
4.	Select a Template for Your Blog There are several templates for you to use but none of them match the templates you used in GeoCities . However, there are several that would work for me. I am going to select the Son of Moto template, which I think might match my chicken site better than most of the others. Pick the template that will work best for your site. It is possible to change templates after your blog is set up, so the choice is not critical. Click on Continue to finish. You are now able to start posting to your blog.