First Things First

The only thing you need to set up your free blog on blogger.com is an email. If you don't want to use your work email, you can get a free email at places like yahoo or gmail. I have three separate emails that I blog from. I use my school email for all blogs related to education, my personal email for my blogs about my family, my children's blogs and my blog about loss and I have opened up ANOTHER email to remind me of those first steps I took when I first became a blogger and created THIS blog.

Go to blogger.com and fill in all the information they ask you. Don't lie on your birthday. When setting up a blog for a friend I didn't know what year she was born so chose the current year. Blogger said that she wasn't old enough to blog and then blocked her email (sorry Chrissy). You do not have to put your birthday anywhere, and it will only publish the information you give them... (more on that later).

You will create your account, name your blog and then choose your template. Blogger has a lot of cute templates that you can use. If you would like your blog to look like this one (and change the backgrounds based on your mood or the season), you can do so later. I have other posts that will give you instructions on how to do that. To get to those posts later, you can click here. For now, choose any blogger background, just so we can get started.

Once you click "start blogging" you will be taken to your "dashboard" which is where you will add interesting things to your blog (widgets), control the settings, design and most importantly... POST! The dashboard is set up to look like a folder system and the tabs will help you navigate through them. The first stop I would suggest in setting up your blog is the "Settings" tab.
It is here where you can change the title of your blog (if you'd like), add a description (though you don't have to) and control who can see your blog. You can change these things at any time. I have turned off all of my search engines on my school blogs and family blogs so that they are hard to find for the 'casual' person, though blogs that I don't mind people reading (like this one or the one I have written about loss) are open to the public. I also blog using the 'old editor' because I use an old template that is compatable with "The Cutest Blog on the Block" backgrounds. I'm guessing you will need to switch to "old editor" to do the things that I mention on this blog. Once you have things the way you would like them, click "Save Settings" at the bottom of the page.

The next thing I would do is stay in the "Settings" tab, but click "Comments". If you would like to encourage comments, click on "Anyone" next to where it says, "Who Can Comment?".

The only other thing I would do on this page is scroll all the way to the bottom and right above where you will save the settings it says, "Comment Notification Email". If you would like to be notified anytime anyone makes a comment, enter your email here. You can enter multiple emails. For example, anytime someone comments on my classroom blog I get an email of that comment to both my home and school emails. If there is a comment that is inappropriate, I can delete it at any time.

There are many things that you can play with in settings, but (to me) these are the important details to setting up a blog prior to actually posting.