3.5 Your First Post

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Remember in lesson 1 when I said that posting to a blog is as easy as sending an email? Well, here you go. If you've ever sent an email, then the Compose Post form should look familiar.

Begin by giving your first post a title. For the sake of this lesson, I've come up with the groundbreaking title, "Welcome to my Blog."

Next, write a post in which you introduce yourself and the guiding principles of your blog. Who are you? Why are you blogging? What specific goals do you have in mind for this website?

As in many email and word processing programs, Blogger gives you several options for formatting the content of your post. Use this first post as an opportunity to experiment a bit. Try to break it. There's no grade attached here, so have some fun. When you finish writing your content, click "Publish Post."

Most of the icons are self-explanatory, but I'll give you a quick rundown nonetheless.

Text Formatting — Allows you to choose from a standard collection of fonts, font-sizes, colors, styles of emphasis, and alignments. The best way to use text formatting is to type your content then highlight the text that you wish to change. For example, in my first post I changed the color and the size of the words "formatted text."


Hyperlink — Allows you to link to another webpage, within or external to your site. For example, in my first post I created a hyperlink to my personal website.


Lists — Allows you to create ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists. As with other text formatting, it is best to first write the content that you wish to turn into a list, making hard returns (the Enter key) between each item. Then highlight the items and click the ordered or unordered list button.


Quotations — As I mentioned earlier, it is standard blogging practice to note all content that has been quoted from another source. The quotation button formats that content differently. Note: whenever quoting another web source, you should also provide a link.


Spellcheck — That one's pretty self-explanatory, don't you think?


Remove Formatting — The eraser button removes all formatting from highlighted text. This comes in handy, for example, when you decide that you don't want any of your post content to be italicized or bolded.


Upload Image — Linking to images within Blogger does take a bit of work. Although it is beyond the scope of this module, Blogger has recently launched the Hello BloggerBot, which allows you to store your original images for free. The instructions for doing so are simple and easy-to-follow. Linking to an image from an existing web server requires that you switch over to Edit HTML view . . .


Edit HTML — By default, Blogger will take you to the Compose Post screen. However, clicking Edit HTML allows you to mess with the raw code. This can come in handy, especially if you want to include an image. For example, in my first post I added the following line of HTML:

<img src="http://www.longpauses.com/blog/12_21_04.jpg">

The file "12_21_04.jpg" is a small caricature of Richard Nixon that lives on my personal web space. By adding this line of code, I am borrowing this image, so to speak. Note: Although bloggers "borrow" images like this all of the time, doing so can step into the realm of copyright infringement, and, especially if your site gets a lot of traffic, you might be accused of "bandwidth stealing."


Allow Comments — By default, commenting will be available on each post. There will be times, however, when you will choose to deny readers the ability to comment.


Change Time & Date — By default, Blogger will show the current time and date. Here is where you back- and forward-date your entries.

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