Sunday, March 8, 2009

Entering Blog Posts in Blogger

What good's a blog if you don't say anything in it?

Entering blog posts can be very easy. Just go to your dashboard, select your blog, and click the Posting tab. By default, a page appears that allows you to enter all the information in your blog post, starting with the title. By default, your title will link to a page with only the current post (useful if you want to send a link to one specific post). However, you can use the Link field to link to a different page.

Below that, you can enter your post. If you pick the Compose option in the work area, you can enter text just as you would in a word processor. Unless you're fluent in HTML and want to do something the text editor doesn't allow, you can do everything you need to in the Compose view.

Under the text-entry area, you can specify labels for your posting. Labels are very useful, because they allow users to display groups of related blog posts. For instance, the labels for this post are blogging and social media. If you click one of those labels at the bottom of the post, Blogger displays a list of all the posts in that category. You can also display your labels your sidebar in the Layout tab.

If you click the Post Options link to the left of the labels entry, you can determine whether to allow comments for this specific post, and reset the date and time to appear with the post.

Finally, you can publish the post now, or save it to complete or publish later. I'm writing this post with a plan to publish it in the future. Remember, blogging depends on new content to attract readers. If your blog posts aren't timely, you can write some now, and publish them later so there's something new every few days.

Next: How to edit existing entries.

2 comments:

Dr. Richardson said...

I agree that you must keep content fresh. This is more great info on blogging. Thanks for the tips, Chris. Do other blogs use the same basics as blogger?

Chris Hamilton said...

If you use WordPress.com, it's not that much different. WordPress is a little different animal, though. There's a WordPress.org version that is open to whatever the person hosting it wants to include, and it has the potential to be a lot more powerful.

Those are the ones I'm most familiary with, though. And if you can create a blog on Blogger, you can do it on wordpress.com.