Introduction to Blogging Why we blog and how we do it.

What is Blogging? A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links. A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people. Blogs are alternatively called web logs or weblogs. However, "blog" seems less likely to cause confusion, as "web log" can also mean a server's log files.

Why blog? We blog for many different reasons, including:  Personal journals: recording events in our own lives  Political and social commentary: sharing personal opinions on global issues  Building Community: reaching out to others who share our views, interests or careers

How do we blog? We create a create a blog using blogger.com, name it and begin posting. The following slides will guide you in setting up your blog.

If you want to start a Blogger blog for free there are some very simple steps. Step one is going to From there it is all pretty simple so I will just walk you through the screens with the aid of the following screen captures.

When you arrive at blogger, you see that there are three steps: 1.) create an account, 2.) name your blog, and 3.) choose a template. It’s that simple and easy. Your blog address will end up in the format.

An account will only require a working , a unique user name, and a unique blog address. In this instance, I used anticsgirl as my user name and chose to put my real name, Marcia, in the display name, but this is up to you. Then click continue.

Next, you need to choose the title of your blog. I chose Dubious Dispatches as my title. I also chose the blog address of anticsgirl which results in the URL to my blog-in-the making to be: In order to make sure that you are in fact a human blogger, (rather than an automated system which is phishing) you will need to verify the wacky words in green. When you’re finished, pass over the advanced setup, and click continue.

Next, you need to choose an initial look-and-feel, called the template. I chose the Minima template by selecting its corresponding radio button. Then click continue.

Then Blogger tells you what its progress is and should reward you with a start posting arrow.

The first thing you will see it a rich text editor, also known as a WYSIWYG editor. This should emulate your experience with Word, Wordperfect, and your webmail experience. The rich text editor allows you to blog and link and italicize with abandon — without knowing any HTML (although if you look closely you will see that there is an Edit HTML choice). When you finish with your post (and feel free to play around a lot) you can click Publish Post.

You will be rewarded with a Publishing in Progress bar…

And when you are done, you can click on the View Blog button and… And that is it. You have just created a blog and published your first blog post.