Basic Lesson 8: Adjusting Your Blog Settings

The settings section of your blog is very important as it controls a lot of the functionality by which your readers interface with your blog. As you can see from the image below, the Settings tab is divided into 8 sub-tabs. The default settings on most options will suffice but we will point out a few you should consider changing.



The Basic Sub-Tab
Filling in the Description section on this sub-tab gives you a sub-title for your blog that falls right below the title. This is a great place to give a description of what your blog is about as readers will see this immediately.



E-mail post links are turned off by default. When turned on, a little envelope icon appears beneath each of the posts on your blog. Readers can click this icon to easily e-mail another person a link to your post. Since you want readers to spread the word about your blog, turning this tool on is a great idea.



The Formatting Sub-Tab
The default number of posts displayed on the front page of your blog is seven. You can change this to a higher or lower number or even change the option to displaying a certain number of days worth of posts. We find 7 posts is a reasonable number, but feel free to change it to suit your taste.



The Comments Sub-Tab
If you want readers to be able to leave comments on your posts, make sure the Show Comments option is on. You have three choices regarding who can leave comments on your blog. The most restrictive is "Only Members of This Blog". You can assign membership to a blog, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a free and open exchange of ideas. "Only Registered Users" is a good choice as only people who have signed up for a Blogger account can post comments. This will help cut down (but not eliminate) spam comments. The most risky option is allowing "Anyone" to comment. This can lead to bad spam problems if moderation is not enabled.



If you decide to show comments (and thereby allow people to leave comments), you should enable moderation. This requires you to enter an e-mail address. Whenever a non-member leaves a comment, you will receive an e-mail. You will need to check the comments frequently to ensure they are valid (not spam) or are not offensive to you or your readers. You can delete comments you don't like. Showing word verification for comments is a great way to cut down on spam. To leave a comment, a person has to key in the letters shown on screen in a small box. This foils automated software agents that are often used to leave spam comments.



The Permissions Sub-Tab
On this sub-tab, you can assign other people the ability to create posts on your blog. This is especially useful for student group blog projects or for maintaining a blog with fellow faculty members. To assign more authors, just click the blue Add Authors button.



The dialog box below is now displayed. Just enter the e-mail addresses (separated by commas) of the people you wish to invite. Then click the orange Invite button. When they receive your e-mail invitation, they will be able to register on Blogger (if they don't already have an account) and become an author on your blog.

Basic Lesson 7: Organizing Your Blog By Topic (Labels)

Most people find it easier to search a blog by topic. Fortunately, Blogger has included a feature called labels that make it easy to provide a list of postings by topic.

At the bottom of the post window is a section called "Labels for this post". In this box, you can enter any terms you think will help categorize your posts. Labels can contain more than one word. If you are using multiple labels for a posting, make sure to separate each label with a comma.



If you find it hard to remember the labels being used on your blog, just click on the show all link. This will display all the labels currently being used on the blog. Just click the "Hide all" link to hide the labels again.



Once you've assigned labels to all your posts, you need to display a clickable index of those labels on your blog so that readers can display all posts related to that particular topic. To add an index of your labels, you must insert a new page element on your blog layout.

In the blog editing mode, click on the Template tab. Then click on the Page Elements sub-tab. Click on the Add a Page Element link to display the list of possible page elements that can be added to your blog.



From the list of elements in the Choose a New Page Element dialog box, click Add to Blog under the element Labels.



The Configure Labels dialog box now appears. Change the title for the archive list to something obvious like Blog Topics. Chose to sort the topics alphabetically or by frequency (number of postings in that topic). Click the orange Save Changes button to add the topic archive to your blog.



When you click on View Blog, you will notice that the topic archive is now displayed on your blog. Every time you assign labels to a blog posting and publish the post, this list will be updated.

Basic Lesson 6: Layout of a Blog Explained & Modifying Your Profile

The layout of the default blog is pretty much the same for all of the standard templates provided by Blogger. There are two columns. One contains your posts and the other contains useful elements that provide functionality to your readers. The two default elements that will appear in a basic blog are the Blog Archive and the Author Profile (About Me). In subsequent lessons, we'll discuss other elements that you might want to add to your blog layout, but for the rest of this post we'll discuss the two default elements.



The Blog Archive provides a listing of your posts grouped by month (you can change this to other periods) in reverse chronological order. This helps readers find past posts in your blog that they may want to read and provides an easy way to navigate to them. But chronological archives aren't always the best way to navigate a blog. Grouping postings by topics if often much more useful. See Lesson 7 to learn how to organize your blog by topic.

The about me section provides you with an opportunity to list details about yourself on your blog. This blog element brings in information from you Profile. You can reveal as little or as much information in your profile as you wish. To edit your profile click on View My Complete Profile (in the About Me section) and then click on the Edit Your Profile button that appears on the next page.



Explore the profile at your leisure and decide what you wish to reveal. If you don't feel comfortable revealing some piece of information (even your name)...then don't put it in the profile! Remember...

Basic Lesson 5: Embedding YouTube Video in Posts

YouTube is full of useful videos that you or your students may want to add to a blog. Also, many of our students are posting video at YouTube that they made themselves which might make a great addition to a blog. Fortunately, since Google owns Blogger and YouTube, it is easy to integrate YouTube video into your blog.

This is an example of what video looks like when embedded in a blog. Just click the arrow in the middle of the window to play the video.



Follow these easy steps to embed YouTube video into your blog posts.

Step 1: Locate the appropriate video on YouTube.

Step 2: Find the embed code box located next to the video on YouTube. Click in the embed box to highlight the code. Right click when the code is highlighted and click copy.



Step 3: So far you have been working on the Compose Tab of the posting window. This hides all HTML code from you. However, when working with embedding video (or other HTML code) in a post, it is best to work in the Edit Html window. Just click the Edit Html tab to switch over.



Step 4: Paste the embed code that you copied into the appropriate place in your posting text window. The video will now appear in your post as it does above in this post.

Basic Lesson 4: Meaningful Links in Posts

A better way to show links in a post is to have them be descriptive Best Sci-Fi Book Review Site rather than just a web address such as www.futurefiction.com. Fortunately, there is an easy way to generate links such as this in Blogger.

Type the text you want to turn into a link first such as:

Bill's Wonderful Web Site

Highlight the text by left clicking the mouse at the start of the text and then dragging the mouse to the end of the text. When highlighted, the text should look something like this:


With the text highlighted, click the Link button to display the link dialog box.


Enter the address of the web site (such as microsoft.com) after the http:// and click OK. The link will now be clickable as follows:

Bill's Wonderful Web Site

Basic Lesson 3: Adding Pictures to a Post

Adding pictures to your posts livens up an otherwise plain blog. To add pictures to a blog, you need to:

1) Have the picture you want to add to your blog saved on your hard drive.
2) Have the URL of the picture you want to add (assuming it is available on the web somewhere).

To add a picture saved on your hard drive, follow these steps:



1A) Place the cursor where you want to insert the picture. Blogger won't always insert the picture here (but it might). If the picture isn't inserted in the correct spot, you can always move it.

1B) Click the Add Image icon (looks like a little landscape) to display the Upload Images dialog box (show below).



1C) Click browse to navigate to the directory on your computer where the image you wish to add to your post is stored.

1D) Select the layout for the image. This determines how the text will wrap around the image. If you don't want the text wrapping around the image (in the case of the screenshots in this posting you are reading), select None.

1E) Select the size you wish the image to be. For screenshots, select large to have any hope of readability.

1F) The first time you upload an image to Blogger, you will be asked to confirm that you accept the terms of service. Click the Terms of Service link to read them and click the check box to indicate your agreement.

1G) Click the orange Upload Image button to upload the image to your posting.

If the image does not end up in the proper spot on your posting, left click on the image to select it. Then right click and select "Cut" from the shortcut menu that appears. Position your cursor in your posting where you want the image to appear, right click and select "Paste" from the shortcut menu. This should insert the image in the proper spot.

Basic Lesson 2: Creating a Basic Text Post

From the posting section of the blog management tools, you can create new posts and edit previous posts. Creating a new post is very similar to creating an e-mail message.

Step 1 - Creating a New Post


1A) Enter a title for the post just as you would for the subject of an e-mail.

1B) Type the text of your post in the large dialog box. You can apply formatting such as bold or italics by using the "b" or "i" icons located above the posting dialog box.

1C) When you enter a URL into the dialog box (such as your personal web page), the software will turn it into a clickable link.

1D) To see what your posting will look like once you publish it to your blog, click the preview link. This does not publish the post to your blog but merely gives you a sneak peak. The screenshot below shows what the preview screen looks like. Just click the Hide Preview link to return to your post so you can continue working on it.



1E) Blogger automatically saves a draft of your post on a periodic basis. If you have made changes and want to save the post manually, just click the Save Now button.

1F) When you are happy with your post, click publish post to have the post displayed on your blog. You can always edit it later if you spot changes that need to be made.