Beginning Blogging 12. Social Blogging.

I think that one of the most enjoyable sides to Blogging, unless you happen to keep your blog private of course, is the socialising side of it. I have found that when compared to forming online friendships via other social network methods such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, blogging is the only way that you can feel confident that you know the person concerned and can decide whether you feel comfortable in forming an online friendship with them. Because of the more detailed information contained inside their blog posts, its easier to feel as if you actually know that person even if they live at the other side of the world from you and you will probably never meet each other in person. It would be very difficult to do this from the limited insight you can gain from a short sentence or a 140 letter comment!  So how do you find other peoples blog posts to read them and then form any online friendships on Blogger or Wordpress?

Beginning Blogging 11. Slideshow’s and Galleries.

If you have a photo portfolio type blog, or if you simply want to include some photos for the readers of your blog perhaps to illustrate its contents, then its a good idea to familiarise yourself with using the Gallery and Slideshow features which are available to you on Wordpress.com. These two features become available once you have uploaded some photos or pictures to your Media Library on Wordpress. Let’s take a look shall we?

First of all you need to upload some photos from your computer so go to your Wordpress blog, click on  My Dashboard and then select Media from the left hand sidebar. If you have already included any photos in any of your blog posts, they will now be shown listed under your Media Library on the right. We could add some of the photos already there, but for this demo let’s upload some new one’s. Click on Add New either from the sidebar or from the top of the Media Library page.

Beginning Blogging 10. Menu’s Pages and Tabs, oh my!

Most themes on Wordpress allow you to add a Custom Menu to your blog page, where you can provide ‘click through’ tabs for your readers to access other areas. These can be either pages, such as About Me, or alternatively other blogs or websites. So let’s set up our Custom Menu. We’ll begin by creating a page about ourselves, and we’ll include a sort of résumé and a photo so that our viewers can find out more about the author of this blog.

Go to your Wordpress Dashboard. Down the left hand sidebar, you will see Pages listed between Links and Comments. Click on Pages and note that there is already one available titled About. Click on Edit. You will now be in the Edit Page with the online editor available. Simply write something about yourself here. You can include a photo of yourself by clicking on the small image icon at the top of the online editor window next to Get Shortlink. When you are happy with your About page, click on Update.

Beginning Blogging 9. Keeping up Appearances.

Next let’s work through choosing another Theme for your blog, giving it a header of your choice and also choosing a new background. Some of the newer themes allow you to add a new header and background to them. So let’s choose one shall we? From your Wordpress dashboard, click on Appearance from the left hand sidebar. You will be presented with all the themes that are currently available on Wordpress. We need to narrow our search for a new theme down to background and header customisation.

Beginning Blogging 8. the Wordpress Dashboard.

Just as with the Blogger Dashboard, the Wordpress Dashboard is where you have total control over all the settings for your blog. At first glance it can appear quite daunting to a newbie because their appears to be a lot going on on the one page, but just take your time to familiarise yourself with the layout (which can be altered by the way) Because these posts are for anyone new to blogging, I intend to only concentrate on those areas that someone new needs to familiarise themselves with, so let’s take a look shall we?

Beginning Blogging 7 Joining Wordpress.com

Now let’s take a look at setting up a blog on Wordpress. Recently the Wordpress team (known as the Theme Team) have been giving users a multitude of new themes to choose from, most of which contain some really useful customisation features. Just as with Blogger, Wordpress is very simple and easy to set up for even a complete novice to begin blogging. Not only that, it has one of the most easy to use user Dashboards for controlling everything about your blog that I have ever used.  So, let’s get started shall we?

To begin, go to  http://wordpress.com and click on the orange ‘Sign up Now’ tab under Express yourself. Start a blog on the top right hand side of the Wordpress.com home page.

Beginning Blogging 6. The Template Designer.

In this post, I am going to completely alter my Template with the aid of Bloggers template designer. The main post  area (blog) will be made full width so that means that the sidebar will have to disappear. Any Gadgets  I already have included will therefore have to move either to the bottom Gadget area or the top area. I will also add a background  to my blog using the template designer. Fonts and colours will also be changed. So let’s work our way through using the Template Designer.