POSTING TO YOUR BLOG
Blogs provides an interface from which to post your entries. If you need to, go to the Blogger Web site and sign in. You can choose to click the Remember Me box so that you don’t have to sign in every time you go to blogger.com. You can have multiple blogs under the same user account with Blogger, so when you sign in you have to select which blog you want to post to, even if you only have one blog. Follow these steps to create a new post:
1. Select your blog.
2. Click the Create a New Post button.
3. Type a title.
4. Type the text of your entry.
If you want to bold some text, click and drag to highlight it. Click the B button and the HTML code that creates bolded text is inserted. You can also italicize text and indent it.
Decide what you want to do with your post:
• To save this post and come back to it later, click the Save as Draft button.
1. Select the text you want to be clickable.
2. Click the Insert Link icon (it looks like a small globe with a chain link on top of it).
An Enter URL dialog box opens.
3. Enter the URL of the site you want to link to, as shown in Figure 5-9.
Be sure to include the http://before the address.
4. Click OK.
The HTML that creates a link is added to your entry. Blogger does not allow you to post images on its server, so you need to place your images online in another location. For example, you can put your image on your own Web site or use a photo service such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) or BloggerBot (www.hello.com) to post your images online. Some of these ser¬vices, like Flickr, resize your images for you.
Take note of the URL where you post your images so you can provide a link to them on your blog.
Windows users can download the BloggerBot Hello software to their comput¬ers and use their Blogger usernames to upload images for free.
Blogger permits you to allow comments on your blog, but you may want to change some of the settings. Follow these steps after logging into your account to update your comments settings:
1. Select the blog you want to work on.
2. Click the Settings tab and then click the Comments link.
The settings page for comments appears
3. Choose to show or hide comments.
If you choose to hide comments on your site, they don’t display, but
they aren’t deleted. To show all comments, choose Show.
4. Choose from the following three options in the Who Can Comment? drop-down list:
• Anyone: Any visitor to the blog can comment.
• Only Registered Users: Only members of the Blogger service can comment. (Readers can register for free.)
• Only Members of This Blog: If you add members to your blog (see the “Adding another author” section later in this chapter), only they will be permitted to post comments.
5. Select what behavior future posts have from the Default for Post drop-down list.
The New Posts Have Comments option turns comments on in the future.
6. If you want to know when someone posts a comment on your blog, enter your e-mail address in the Comment Notification Address box.