Saturday, March 17, 2007

Build a Free Blog

How to Build a Free Blog

What is a Blog?

Wikipedia defines a blog as a "user generated website where entries are made in Journal style and displayed in reverse Chronological order." (Newest entries show up on top). A typical blog will contain text, images, and lots of links. Many people use a blog as a chronicle or diary.

Building a free Blog from Blogger.com is very easy.

Blogger.com is a division of Google. You need a Google account to create a free blog on blogger.com but it is easy to get a google account.  Sign up for a Gmail account andy you will automatically have a Google account.

Login to Blogger

Once you have your google account you can either go directly from your google email account by clicking on the "more" button above the search window or going to http://www.blogger.com/ and signing in with your google handle and password.  

Do a Google search for Blogger and if you are signed into your account you will go directly to your Blogger account.

Next you will have to sign up for Blogger.

Then you name your first blog. Don't worry you can build as many blogs as you want so the name of your first blog doesn't matter. I normally name the blog and try to use the same name as the blog address. 

Your blog address will have .blogspot.com after the name of your blog. I just built a blog for this article called http://buildafreeblog.blogspot.com/. I chose the Sand Dollar template. 

I named it "Build a Free Blog".

What is a blog good for? It is a really easy way to put information on the web for anyone to access.

You can put family pictures or plans for a family event.  You can put non critical business information up easily accessed by anyone in the company.  You can have several people with the rights to modify or add posts to the blog.

You can put up your garden club information and easily spread the blog address for anyone to view.

You can put the schedule and meeting place for the Weekly Mountain Bike Ride.  You can post pictures of the group ride last weekend.

It is a really easy format to post information and the last post will come up first.  You can specify one post to always be on top if you like.

Domain Names and Free Blogger Hosting

Adding a Domain name to your Blog.  This has become very easy with Google Domain names.  I recently purchased the domain  Your Credit Questions.com  from Google.  It was very easy to apply the domain name to the blog I had been building for a while.  The Google Domain I purchased is $12 per year.

It is still free blog hosting for my blog even with my own Domain name.  I don't have a $5 a month hosting bill like I would with anywhere else I have my blog hosted.


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