Publishing, Configuring Privacy, Editing, and Composing Your Blog
The Basic settings page is a page you shouldn’t skip when you start your new Blogger blog. On this page, you can make your blog public or private, add a blog description, change your blog title, and set up editing options. Take some time to review each option shown in Figures below and configure them as described in the following steps.
1. Enter a title for your blog in the Title text box. If you want to change the title of your blog, this box is the place to do it. The title you enter here appears in the header area of your blog.
2. Enter a description for your blog in the Description box. You can enter a description of as many as 500 characters in the Description text box. Note that whatever you type in the Description box appears beneath your blog title in the blog header area, so take some time to write a useful description that not only describes what your blog is about but also entices visitors to read more.
3. Select Yes or No from the Add Your Blog to Our Listings drop-down box. When you select Yes, your blog is displayed occasionally on the Blogger home page, on Blogger Play (a slide show of photos published on Blogger blogs) and Next Blog (the navigation bar that appears at the top of all Blogger blogs). If you select No to the question Add Your Blog to Our Listings? within your blog’s Basic Settings page, your blog is still available on the Internet; however, Blogger rotates blogs in the Blogger listings and displays links to those blogs on the Blogger home page, on Blogger Play, and on Next Blog. If you want to attract additional potential traffic from these Blogger listings, select Yes from the Add Your Blog to Our Listings? drop-down menu.
4. Select Yes or No from the Let Search Engines Find Your Blog dropdown menu. A helpful Blogger feature is automatic pinging at Weblogs.com (http://weblogs.com) and automatic inclusion in the Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) results if you select Yes from the Let Search Engines Find Your Blog drop-down menu. Pinging is a behind-the-scenes function that automatically notifies sites such as Google and Technorati whenever a blog is updated. By selecting Yes, every time you update your blog you ensure that Google Blog Search and search engines linked to Weblogs.com are notified that you published new content, and that content is added to those search listings.
This strategy provides more traffic and more ways for people to find your blog.
5. Select Yes or No from the Show Quick Editing on Your Blog dropdown menu. By selecting Yes, you enable one-click blog post editing. When you’re signed into Blogger and viewing your blog online, you can select a link
directly from each blog post, which automatically opens a page where you can edit that post.
6. Select Yes or No from the Show Email Post Links drop-down menu. Selecting Yes places an Email Post link on each of your blog posts so that readers can e-mail your posts to other people with one simple click of the mouse.
7. Select Yes or No from the Adult Content drop-down menu. If your blog contains content that might be considered inappropriate for minors, select Yes from the Adult Content drop-down menu. When people visit a blog that contains adult content, a warning message appears, asking visitors to confirm that they want to proceed before the
blog content loads.
8. Select Yes or No from the Show Compose Mode for All Your Blogs drop-down menu. Unless you know how to use HTML, you should select Yes in the Show Compose Mode for All Your Blogs drop-down menu. Doing so gives you the option to write your blog posts using a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor that acts more like a traditional word processing program than a Web design program.
Filed Under: Blogger
