All Blogs Bright and Beautiful.....

I'm having great fun with this blog!!

I've just passed the 100 visitor mark since I set up the counter, (I admit 7 visits were from me, before I discovered how to set the counter to ignore me) and it's nice to see people showing interest. It's true that I shamelessly promote the blog when I'm online in ESL chat, but I have also been stumbled across by strangers, which is quite nice.

For anyone considering a blog, I'd heartily endorse the idea, and say just get started!!. Following the instructions will get you going, but there are some pitfalls, and it took me a while to get my own blog running smoothly.

There are many sites offering blog space, and naturally I am using Blogspot/Blogger. It seems that Blogspot has grown out of Blogger, and this has caused a little difficulty in refining the setup.

Blogspot also seems to come in two versions, and anyone starting in Blogspot should register with the Beta version straight away. It's also necessary to register with Google, I found, but I already had that. I'm not sure why this is required - it's not well explained, IMHO.

It also appears that instructional text hasn't caught up with some of the latest versions or developments, and you may see the screen display and the help files at odds with each other sometimes.

But having said that, once you've got the thing going, it's great!!

Lots of things can be customised from the *Dashboard* - the basic control panel that sets up the blog - and can be changed readily. It's probably not the best idea to change the blog title and the web address repeatedly, unless of course you are trying to shake off persistent readers, but even that can be done easily.

The template - the screen that one sees when reading blogs - can be changed easily too, but that brings up another problem. If one is familiar with HTML (more below on this) then one can tinker with the appearance of elements of the template, ad infinitum, but if the template is changed from the Dashboard, all customising is lost.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a funny thing... Either you know what it is or not, but it's what creates the appearance of a web page from simple text, and the blog is in reality a slightly jazzy web page.

If the basics of HTML can be grasped, and there are any amount of tutorials on the web which will help, the keen blogger can start to play tricks. Already I've figured out how to add a textured background to my blog, an extra section in the sidebar, and some sidebar editing. Nothing too rivetting there, but it does help.

Adding a visitor counter was a bit trickier, because (as mentioned above) the installation instructions didn't coincide with what appeared on-screen, but it became possible to do some *copy-and-pasting* using the EditHTML feature of the composing window, and the result was good.

Not being an HTML geek, and having a poor memory, I had to refer to a very helpful site which gave a series of tutorials on different aspects of HTML. One feature I found useful was the *table* tag, which has already enabled me to display images side-by-side onscreen. (The native HTML editor in Blogspot uses an HTML style that I can't get my head round, to be honest, especially when it's displayed in such a small window), although I do recognise some elements which I can copy and paste, and then edit.

A lot does depend on the browser used to view the blog, and the display (screen) resolution can also make a difference, but that's something else open for experiment...

I'm looking forward to getting more confident with HTML, and using it to greater effect in the future...