Internet Blogging: eBlogger (blogger.com)

Member Name: Stephoohla

Product:	blogger.com
Date:	26/08/09 (88 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The site is easy to use, free

Disadvantages: You might not want everyone knowing your business!

Some people out there are blog geniuses, with blogs running up everywhere, websites created to host the links to the them, 'RSS' feeds here there and everywhere. Well I'm a complete novice. I'm not very good with computers in general, and when my friend joked I should start a blog, I looked online out of curiosity.

When you type in "blog" in Google Search, blogger.com is the first link it comes up with, so naturally I clicked on that one. I thought 'what the hell' and clicked sign up. I'd never had a blog or experienced one before, and curiosity got the better of me. Plus, it was completely free.

Upon signing up (easy to do, just enter a few basic details), here I entered the World of the Blog. From what I could see out of the thousands of blogs already created on this site, blogs could be used for just about anything. Most people seemed to use it as a personal diary that everyone could read or to post 'Daily Rants'. Others wrote poetry or songs on it. Some wrote film scripts. Some reviewed music and films and beauty products. Some were just blank, clearly after their owner had gotten bored or 'writer's block' and just left.

So I started my own, and made it a diary. I thought about how cool it would be if this site is still around in 20 years and I came across it. Sort of like a time capsule. My posts aren't very interesting. Since I started it in 2007 they've been about school issues and dating issues, now they've progressed onto work issues and boyfriend issues... I suppose if I keep it up one day they'll be baby issues and husband issues!

The site itself is easy to use, with a simple layout, easy to see navigation, simple buttons to press to go where you want to go. The main page you'll go to on Blogger is called the Dashboard, and this is where you can view all of your blogs at once ( yes, you can have more than one. Thanks to this, I now have four :/ ). If you want to go view you blog, simply click on it. There's more options too, such as New Post, for a new entry, or Edit Layout, Edit Settings, etc etc. All perfect for someone like me who doesn't know HTML or CSS (?) codes. Just easy. To write a blog, I click New Post, and a page pops up with a blank box. You can change the font/colour, add pictures, add links, or just write plain text. I find it makes my blogs more interesting when I add photos, and this is easy to do and pictures can be uploaded from either your computer or an internet site (you just need to obtain the URL of the picture, easy to do by right clicking on it, then on Properties, and under "Location" it should have the whole URL, just copy and paste that in).

The site has expanded a bit since I first started using. In 2007, there wasn't a whole lot of extras on the site, pretty much the only option you had was to write a blog or edit a blog. Now they've invented Gadgets, where you can add things, almost like Widgets, if you're familiar with that term, to your blog. At the moment, I've got some goldfish swimming around at the bottom of my blog. You can add comments, lists of things to do, I think you can add the time, you can also add an HTML box, so that if you are familiar with this, you can copy and paste cool things into it. One feature I really like is you can add an AdSense box. AdSense was created by Google and is a way for blogs and websites to have an advertisement on their page and the owner of the blog or website gets some of the project, either just by viewing the ad or by clicking on it. I've not yet tried it out, so can't really comment on whether this makes money, but I'd recommend giving it a go.

Summary: If you haven't got a blog, I advise using blogger.com