CREATE FREE BLOG |
USING BLOG BOOKMARKLETS |
The BlogThis! bookmarklet is a little JavaScript application you can put in your browser's toolbar so that you can post to your Blogger site from anywhere on the Net. To use BlogThis!, you'll first need to install it in your Favorites toolbar. BlogThis! is located in the Settings section within the Blogger interface. Simply drag it to your browser's toolbar, and it's ready to use.
Use BlogThis! whenever you discover a web page you'd like to link and comment about in your blog. When you click BlogThis!, a little pop-up appears, and it will already have a link to whatever page your are visiting. It's tricky like that. Just add your comments and click either Post, or Post and Publish. Again, Post only sends the post to Blogger; if you want it to show up right away, click Post & Publish.
If you highlight text on a page before you activate the bookmarklet, BlogThis! will include the link to the page plus whatever you have highlighted in the form of the pop-up. If you already have a web site and you are interested in adding a blog to it, you need to tell Blogger that you want to FTP it to your own site. The process is the same as getting started with Blog*Spot—up until the part about hosting. At that point, you'll need to choose the option to FTP it to your own server. If you were just testing out Blogger with Blog*Spot and you decide that you like it and would rather have the blog published to your existing or new hosting space, you can change a Blog*Spot-hosted blog to an FTP blog in the Settings tab in Blogger.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is the protocol, or set of rules, which enables files to be transferred from one computer to another. When you use a web hosting company to host your blog, you'll have to set Blogger up to work with an FTP server.
Now that you're signed up and kicking the tires of your new blog, you'll soon become familiar with the Blogger interface. It doesn't take long to get used to clicking around inside Blogger just as you would click Back or Home on your browser's toolbar. Remember that Blogger is software that runs in your web browser, which means that its interface is the web page. The buttons along the top of Blogger's interface are easy to spot and hard to forget.
Deleting a blog should not be taken lightly (unless you've only just created it and you want to start over fresh). Deleting a blog will delete all your posts and erase you from Blogger.com. If you host your own site and Blogger was FTPing the files to your server, your posts might still exist there. You will have to use an FTP client to erase those files from the web.