blogging, part II (Blogger extras…)

Once you finish the five minute job of getting your blog (via Blogger…), there are plenty of things you can do to make your new home a bit more to your liking. Here is the blog I put up on Blogger (here); I’ve already made a few changes…

First off, you should be aware that there are some ‘philosophical’ differences between these blogging platforms. WordPress.com is functionally a poor relation to the WordPress.org site (which gives you their software to load up on your own site…). The WordPress.org (in this light I will use the simple term of WordPress to denote these fully fledged sites and software…) sites (such as this very blog!) have an incredible array of ways to customize your blog. The WordPress.com ‘free’ sites have quite a few good things, but seriously, a free site always has a truncated feature set…

Blogger does this a bit differently… The first thing that you will see is that the site itself is quite a bit ‘plainer’ in appearance than the equivalent at WordPress.com. BUT, you can add almost any widgets you can find. There is another aspect of Blogger which differs from WordPress…IT would seem that all Blogger blogs are all situated at BlogSpot.com. WordPress blogs pop up like mushrooms everywhere…

So, with these differences in mind, you can see that in the world of blogging (knowing that any ‘free’ blogs are at the bottom of the food chain of uppity bloggers…) Blogger may be seen as something akin to a Yahoo.com or Hotmail.com e-mail address. That is, there is nothing wrong with it, it’s just that this address (as with these e-mail addresses) doesn’t connote much other than the fact that they are free. WordPress.com may be seen as about the same thing, but it does seem to have a tentative connection to its more ‘professional’ brother.

So, with all of this in mind, there are some things you can do to spruce up your Blogger site. To me (if only as a personal vagary) the most important aesthetic operation to conclude would be to get rid of the Blogger Navigation bar at the top of the site. Luckily, this is relatively simple to do (it involves a small bit of cut and paste…). Here is a site which covers this operation:

http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2005/01/remove-navbar.html

Now you can start to add in some widgets. First off, simply do a search for ‘blogger widgets’, you will find hundreds of pages of sites presenting all sorts of widgets for your site. I have already added a few widgets to my site, here are some links for these additions:

http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2008/06/blog-tanslation-widget-for-blogger.html

http://www.sociofluid.com/blogger-widget.php

The operation of adding a widget to your blogger site is covered in either of these two links (it is almost stupidly easy!). With this taken care of, you could also spend some time at the ‘blogger dashboard’ and change or alter you theme (the color scheme for your site). If you do some searching or ‘blogger themes’, you will find a correspondingly large amount of information and links to sites which offer any number of different themes for blogger.

At this point, about the only thing left would be to start writing…