First Blog

I've been doing this blog thing for a while now. In the beginning, I took a generic template, and gradually modified it to fit my own wants. For me, the basic template does most of what I want, so I don't get too crazy with modifications - however, some people end up doing away with the generic templates and completely create a layout from scratch. This article is geared more toward someone wishing to set up a blog for the first time.

A few of my annoyances were:

1. Templates

The generic templates usually have some sort of "Edit-me" link lists. Getting rid of these can be overwhelming if you aren't a "programmer" and/or do not know the basics of html editing (or, perhaps, do not know what html is).

After you login, and go to Blogger Dashboard, click "Change Settings", and choose the Template tab, it brings up a form full of strange text. Scroll down through it till you get to something like:

< href="http ://news.google.com/"> Google News < /a >
< href="http ://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=110"> Edit-Me < /a >

Simply change the text news.google.com to example.blogspot.com and Google News to Example, and the second (and third, etc) to whatever you want them to be or delete them all.

The end result might be:
Example
Another, sorta, blog site

Changing other settings, or adding other "code" into your template is easy enough. At first, it may appear overwhelming, but after a bit of playing around, you'll learn what does and does not work.

Just remember - when working with templates... Use the "Preview" button first. It may save you a lot of grief if you accidentally delete part of the page or something critical (yeah - been there, done that).

2. Spam comments

These annoyed me more than anything, when I first started. Having comments is great - but if left "wide open" you will find some posts get "spam" comments - that is, some generic message that says "Great job on your blogsite. Visit my page at www.iamtryingtosellthings.com (or whatever).

The simplest thing I have found to reduce them is to turn on "word verification". This may be found by going to the Blogger Dashboard, clicking on "change settings", then go to the sub heading of "Comments". There are several defaults here that you might wish to change, including the word verification.

Another nifty new option is the "moderation" feature. With this feature, all comments will be emailed to you for approval before being posted to your blog.

Besides the preventative measures above - if you do happen to get spam comments, or other offensive or inappropriate comments on your blog, you can delete them by viewing the comments, and clicking the little trash can icon at the bottom of the post. Note that you do have to be logged into blogger as the owner of the site to see the icon.

3. Visitors

How do I know who has been here to my site? There are no "built-in" tracking mechanisms for tracking visitors to your site, but there are a couple of good freebies out there that can give you good statistics, including the popular www.sitemeter.com (just go there and register - they'll provide you the code to paste into your template, or even push it into your site for you once you provide login credentials), or the lesser known www.statcounter.com (which has a lot of nice features, too, including invisible counters - seen only by you). There are a lot more providers out there, but those are a couple that I like.

To get a sample of what sort of data you might get with these, click here to see this page's detailed visitor information.