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Thursday 8 July 2010

Beginning Blogging. 2. Setting up your Blogger Profile.

For these next posts,  I plan to work my way through using the Blogger Dashboard. This is your ‘control centre’ for your blog, and its fairly comprehensive in content. Because it can be quite complicated to understand and set up for anyone who is new to Blogger, I intend to tackle this area in separate posts because I want to be as detailed as possible. If you have already set up all of your Dashboard to your satisfaction, then you can simply wait until I tackle those areas where you might need more information and guidance.

Your Dashboard

To access your Dashboard, click on Dashboard tab at the top of the page next to your email address. As you can see, its pretty bare of any information at the moment, so let’s work our way through setting everything up shall we?  Let’s begin by setting up our Profile which is more or less the same as setting up a Profile on any blogging site, and most sites will contain one.  Its always a good idea to set up a Profile because then your readers can find out more information about you to help them decide whether or not to follow your blog and become a blogging friend. So first of all,  click on Edit Profile from your dashboard to access the Edit User Profile page.

Privacy.

On the Edit User Profile page, you have lots of different areas to fill in and the very first area  is Privacy. You can choose to Share your profile (good idea if you want to make some new friends on Blogger) Show your real name, Show your email address (not really recommended) Show your blogs (this is only really applicable if you have more than one blog, and allows other users to see all of your blogs that you have on Blogger or alternatively hide one or more of them, Show the sites that you follow (these are any other users blogs that you choose to follow on Blogger, more of which in a  later post.) There is more information about sharing obtained by clicking on the orange question mark which will provide you with a more detailed explanation regarding Google Connect.

Identity.

Your Username which you need to use in order to log into Blogger and access your blog (this will be your email address you used when setting up your blog) your email address for Blogger to use for comments, notifications, news etc. NOTE. This doesn’t have to be the same email address you chose previously when setting up your blog.  Your Display name. (What name you prefer to have showing on your blog and to be used to sign your blog posts.) For example I have chosen Newbie for these how-to’s, your first name and last name (these boxes do NOT have to be filled in and can be left blank) a photo to let others know what you look like and which will also be used whenever you comment on other users blog posts, an audio clip URL if you wish to provide an audio greeting.

General.

This area contains information boxes such as Gender, Birthday, Homepage URL, Wishlist URL (where you can place the URL that you WISH was available for your blog) and lastly your Instant Message user name. You do NOT have to fill any of these boxes in if you don’t want to . 

Location.

You don’t have to fill any of these areas in if you don’t want to. However, it can be useful to other users to know whereabouts you reside. You do NOT have to give your exact location, you can be as vague as you wish. (see my completed Profile)

Work

Again, you do not have to complete these fields if you do not wish to do so.

Extended Info.

This area is where you can place any of your favourite things, your interests, books, films etc. Basically you do not have to fill in any of the boxes provided if you don’t want to unless it specifies that the information is needed, and in fact only the User Name and Display name are obligatory. Also if you don’t want to use a photo of yourself, you could use an Avatar instead. Once you have completed any details that you wish to include, click on Save Profile at the bottom of the page. Here’s my completed profile for Newbie.

My Edited Proflle

TG  Next post I’ll tackle the Settings area.

9 comments:

  1. Hi Technogran, Good job again! I see you are also putting this on your WordPress blog. I assume you are using Windows Live Writer and then just publishing to both. It sure is a great program. I still think it odd that Microsoft wouldn't want to make a blogging platform to match.
    I hope you have a nice day!

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  2. Agree Gerry, and Live Writer works especially well with Wordpress. You can publish both a post and a page, insert split posts etc.

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  3. Nicely explained tutorial TG.

    I have a question that I'm hoping you have an answer to. In Live Writer, how in the world do you achieve the split post/read more effect.
    Honestly, I'm lost.

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  4. At the moment this is not possible to do on Blogger. It only works with Wordpress I'm afraid. The split post feature is available in the new beta version under the Insert tab and is found to the far left of the ribbon interface.
    I am not sure if any templates on Blogger use this feature. I can ask the live team if they intend to include it for Blogger if you like.

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  5. TG;
    I've done this with Bloggers new editor, and it worked out okay, I was asking about LIve Writer, for I really like using it better, but if I'm not able to apply a rather important function as split post, then LW's use is rather limited to me.

    Thanks kindly for answering my question.

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  6. Jerry all I can do is ask the bods at Live Writer if they are going to enable this function on Blogger as well as Wordpress. I am currently using the Wave 4 beta version, and there doesn't seem to be a way to do 'split posts' for my blogger blogs at present. That doesn't mean though that it isn't going to be included before the final released version so I will find out for you and let you know.

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