I Think, Therefore I Blog (blogger.com)

Member Name: Kukana

Product:	blogger.com
Date:	14/08/05 (1360 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very easy to use, free, plenty of features, simple uploading of photos

Disadvantages: Changing template side-bar requires a little HMTL knowledge

For nearly eight years I've been writing about my life in Cyprus, home education, and general ramblings, on a Geocities web-site. It's worked well, but every time I upload a new page I have to remember to send the photos separately, to ensure they're the right size, and to update all the relevant links too. Not being very good with HTML (the language in which most web-sites are written), and inherently lazy, I tend to put it off.

A few months ago my site started approaching the 15meg maximum, so I explored other options for continuing. My teenage sons told me I should start a 'blog'.

The word blog, for anyone as behind the times as I was, is an abbreviation of web-log, and refers to an online journal. According to the BBC site recently, there are now 14 million blogs around the world, with a new one starting every second. I jumped on the band-wagon not a moment too soon.

There are many sites set up to allow people to blog (yes, it's a verb as well as a noun) easily. One of the best-known is blogger.com which is owned by Google. Signing up took about two minutes of my time, and I was pleased to learn that I could choose exactly how much of my information was to be made public. First name: yes. Surname, date of birth, email address: no.

Since I planned to write about my daily life living abroad, and let my relatives in the UK know about it, I had no wish to be totally anonymous; however it's entirely possible to choose a username that has nothing to do with your real name, and hide all personal information. Moreoever, a blog itself can be kept private for those who want a journal that's unlikely to be read by anyone. Some people have more than one blog, and choose to keep one or more private.

Moreover there are several built-in templates at Blogger, allowing you to select from a variety of colourschemes and styles for your pages. These can be adjusted (if you know a bit of HTML) or you can search for themes elsewhere online, or indeed you can make your own from scratch. But the easiest way is to choose one of the templates provided.

Actually writing in the blog could hardly be easier. The 'dashboard' or logged-in homepage gives a list of your blogs. You can click the blog name, which brings up a list of all recent entries (any of which you can edit), or 'create new' which brings up a box for typing.

There are two modes for entering information: simple composing entry, which is roughly what-you-see-is-what-you-get, or HTML mode for those who know a bit more about web pages. In the compose mode, which I normally use, you can change font (and colour and size), insert pictures from your computer, and use hyperlinks to other web pages. It's so easy and intuitive that I didn't need to consult the help pages at all to get started when I made my first post just five months ago.

If you get interrupted, or can't decide how to finish your post, you can save a draft for editing in future. Moreover if your computer crashes, or some other disaster happens when you hit the 'publish' key, and you haven't saved the post anywhere, then there's a temporary backup which Blogger makes every so often, enabling you to restore from the last save. Not perfect, but better than nothing.

If you don't live abroad, and your life seems quite ordinary, is there any reason to have a blog? Isn't it just attention-seeking to publish one's private journal for the world to see?

Yes to the first, for anyone who likes to write. As for whether it's attention-seeking, it's not so different from writing on an opinion site. You can let large numbers of people know about your blog, and make comments on other people's in the hope they might visit yours - or you can just write for your own sake, and not worry about the audience. Having said that, Google searches public blogs successfully (perhaps particularly those on blogger.com) and to my surprise my first blog site was appearing in relevant Google searches within a few weeks of starting.

There are all kinds of bloggers. Perhaps the majority simply talk about their lives: oddities of their neighbourhood, minor problems that occur, amusing things their children say, struggles to deal with aging relatives. It can be a good release from stress to write about the day-to-day stresses we experience, whether or not anyone else reads it. If you like that kind of thing, it's possible to spend hours browsing around, reading about other people's lives.

Then there are other types of blog: about politics, philosophy, religion, recipes, film reviews... anything and everything. The very earliest blogs were used as references to other sites, primarily, but these days many don't link anywhere other than to other blogs.

Of course there are a few restrictions on blogger: the usual ones found at web-sites like this. Nothing illegal, no racism, no hatred, no pornography, and so on. There's a lengthy Terms of Service document in the help pages, which you have to agree to before signing up.

The cost? Nothing.

I was surprised to find there's a whole blogging community out there: complete strangers read and commented on my blog, so I went and read theirs out of interest, and as a result started some new online friendships. There are quite heated discussions in the comments sections of some of the religious or political blogs, and it's possible to spend hours and hours online just going from blog to blog... a bit like being part of a consumer review site, really.

One of the best things, from my point-of-view, is that links are created automatically to previous posts, with an archive made every month, so old posts are still accessible. Down the side of each blog is a 'sidebar' with the author's profile (as much of it as they wish to display), links to previous posts, and space for other links and buttons.

The single drawback, from my perspective, is that to change information in the 'sidebar' of the blog and include my own choice of links, I had to edit the HTML of the template. Having run web-sites before, even using a package to create pages, I've got used to the look of HTML but I don't find it very friendly. I would love a what-you-see-is-what-you-get template editor, but at present that doesn't exist.

It wasn't actually too much of a problem: I skimmed down the template HTML until I found the place where the default links (to Google) were included, and carefully changed them for my own links. I then did much the same when I wanted to set up counters (using a site called blogpatrol.com) a search-box (from Atomz.com) and other features. The sites provided the HTML code I needed and I pasted it in what I hoped was the right place. There's a preview feature which allowed me to check that it would look the way I hoped, and after a little trial and error I succeeded. However I see this as by far the most difficult part of blogging, and change my sidebar as infrequently as possible.

There are, of course, many other blogging sites, some of which offer a slightly different selection of features, some of which require payment but have more facilities. After joining blogger.com I did have a look at some of the others, but couldn't find anything I liked better that would provide me with the basic service I needed. Blogger.com is fast, efficient and effective.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely. I wish I'd started blogging years ago.

Summary: Write your journal or thoughts, include photos, be published instantly!