Working with Blogger Settings, Part I

Blogger includes a number of useful settings you can use to control and enhance your blog. Coincidentally, they're available on the Settings tab in your blog's Dashboard. Today, we'll cover the Basic, Publishing, and Formatting settings.

Basic Settings. These settings allow you to manage basic blog information, including the name of the blog, its description, and whether your blog is accessable by search engines and Blogger's internal listings. If you're writing adult content, you should set the adult content flag to yes. Remember, Blogger is hosting your content, and they can eliminate your blog if they think you're content's not appropriate.

Publishing. Only one setting is listed for publishing, but it's a key one: your blog's URL or web address. Anyone who's saved your blog URL as a favorite won't be able to find your blog if you change the URL. Unless you absolutely need to change your URL, you should keep it the same, even if the focus of your blog changes.

If your want to purchase a domain name (the name of a URL) from a hosting service, such as GoDaddy.com, you can specify that domain name here. (Buying the domain allows you to set your address to something other than blogspot.com.)

Formatting. Although you've already set your layout, you can adjust how things appear in your blog by changing the formatting settings. Formatting allows you to adjust how dates and times appear, what timezone you're in, how many posts appear on the first page, and a number of other settings. In most cases, the default settings will suffice for your usage.

Next time, we'll cover comments, archiving, and e-mail.