Working with Blogger Settings, Part II

As we near completion of our Blogger posts, we'll talk about how to work with Comments, Archiving, and E-mail settings. In most cases, the settings provided as a defaults will work for you, but these settings allow you greater control of your blog.

Comment Settings. One of the neat things about blogs is the ability to interact with your readers. This is especially true if you're using your blog to market your writing. Responding to reader comments can make a fan of that reader for life. You can show or hide comments, limit who can comment, and determine whether comments must be moderated, among other things. As with the other settings, if you accept the defaults for comments, you'll probably be fine. But as you get comments, you can control them using these settings.

Archiving Settings. After your blog post and its associated comments roll off the front page of your blog, they're still accessible via the archives. Archives typically appear in the sidebar. You can use this page to determine how your archive is grouped and whether to allow each post to have its own URL. (You should always allow each post to have a distinctive URL unless you want to prevent people from linking directly to specific posts.)

E-mail Settings. You can have the blog automatically send update notices to up to ten e-mail addresses and use the e-mail address to post to your blog directly from e-mail. Posting from e-mail is useful if you're traveling and have limited access ot the Internet, but still want to blog.

Next time: How to integrate graphics.