Create a blog, start a post: Video tutorial

Above is a video tutorial to show you how easy it is to create a blog and start publishing to the Web. Someone said you can do it within 10 minutes. I say you can do it in much shorter time. If you find the video tutorial too quick and difficult to follow, below is a transcript with some notes added by me and some screen shots to make it easier to follow:

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Hi, I am ????? ???? and I am a support coordinator for Blogger. Today I am going to provide a short demo on how to quickly create a blog in only a few minutes. To get started, go to www.blogger.com. If you already have a Google account, type in your username and password and click "Sign in". If don't already have a Google account, click the "Create your blog now" arrow

and you can easily create an account. Please note you can use any email address to sign up for a Google account.

Click on the "Create your blog now" button or "Create a Blog" link to start a new blog. Create a title for your blog and an address. (This "address" is called a URL or Uniform Resource Locator and is what you type or copy-paste into the address bar of a web browser



You may be prompted to verify some random words on the screen, so just type the letters provided. Then click "Continue". Next choose a template from our library by clicking the circle next to the name of the template, and then click "Continue".



And don't worry, you can easily change the template later. Your blog is now ready for you to add your post. Click on "Start posting". Use our text editor (My opinion is "post editor" is better as you can add more than text in the window) to create text for your blog. Write as much text as you want. To add an image, click on the image icon in the tool bar above the text box. Once you click on the icon, a window will appear where you can select an image from your either your desktop (hard disk drive in your computer which may be a notebook or laptop), or from the Web.

In this case, I am going to select an image from my hard drive which I want in my upper right hand corner and I want it to be large. Then click "Upload Image to continue". You post it to your new blog, and now it is time to view it. (Before you can view anything on the Web, you must publish your post first by clicking on the "Publish post" button ):

Click the "View Blog" link. Here is your blog. Pretty neat.

Now you have your blog, you should send your blog link (URL) to your friends and family.

For more information about Blogger, go to http://help.blogger.com

I have received feedback that information and instructions are more clear and easy to understand at blogs like

Blogger Tips and Tricks

Blogger for Dummies

Just look at some of the comments left by grateful bloggers (reason for compilation not for boasting, but reasons are right at the top of the post).

Label List: What is it and how to use them

Bloggers using Google Blogger have been clamoring for Google Blogger to introduce Categories (a very useful feature) which had been available in other blogging platforms but not the old classic Blogger. That is, until they introduced Blogger Beta (now referred to as New Blogger or just plain Blogger). The only difference is they like to be different and they call it Labels which is the same as the more widely recognised Categories. It enable you to tag (label or categorise) you posts with the same label (category or tag) and make them easy to find.

How to use Labels (Categories or Tags)

The very first thing you have to do is whenever you make posts (or edit old posts), type the relevant labels (categories or tags) in the field provided at the bottom of the post editor (see screenshot below, the part highlighted with a red circle):



You can put as many labels as you like, but they should be separated by commas. Someone asked for help, but I am not exactly what she wants. I think she want her visitor to click a link to all her posts about her favorite books. If that is what she want, all she need to do is to type the label "My favorite books" (minus the quotation marks) into the field for labels (highlighted with a red circle in the screenshot above). She can still add more labels which is relevant to that particlar post if she want by adding a comma, then typing in the other label or labels.

Label List in the sidebar (or elsewhere)

Just adding label or labels to a post will help but will not be very useful because a visitor will see the label or labels only at the bottom of a particular post. It would be much more useful if you add a Label List to the sidebar (or anywhere you like) so that the list of labels you use will appear in every page, including the main (home or index) page, the individual post pages (permalinks) and the archive pages. To do this, if you are in the post editor page, click the TEMPLATE tab and you then should see the LAYOUT. The proceedure may be slightly different depending on which page of Blogger you are in. It could be you will need to click on PAGE ELEMENTS instead. Click on the ADD A PAGE ELEMENT in the LAYOUT page, and you will get a "pop-up". Select LABELS (see screenshot at the beginning of this section). If you do, you will the see CONFIGURE LABELS where you can chose to display the labels either alphabetically or by frequency, plus you will see Labels already added to the title of that Page Element. My habit is to add (Categories or Tags) to that because categories and tags are better known. After you have made a choice, click SAVE CHANGES and you will see the new Page Element added to the top of section. If you are happy with that, your job is done. If you want it elsewhere, hover your mouse over the new Page Element and the cursor will change to a cross: . You can now drag it to wherever you want it.

Like in the example above, you want someone to see all your posts you made about your favorite books, just add the label "My Favorite Books" (minus the quotation marks) and any other labels you want and you will see the link "My Favorte Books" in the Label List in the sidebar. Anyone clicking on that link will see all your posts you made on your favorite books.

Searching for section of codes in template

Various posts have been published about editing the template to achieve various objectives or hacks such as Expandable Post Summary for New Blogger, etc. To implement such hacks, you have to go into the template itself rather than using the Page Elements in the LAYOUT, a method much more user friendly for those who are not comfortable with HTML, etc. Also, you will be required to search through long lines of codes in the template. Bloggers often have problems searching for the particular section of the codes.

Use Find function in task bar (ctrl+F)

One way you can easily find the code is to highlight a part of the code, for example, if you are looking for this block of codes:

<b:include data='post' name='postQuickEdit'/>
</span>
</p>

perhaps you can highlight

quickedit pencil

click ctrl+F and a "Find" box will appear at the left bottom corner of the task bar, type or paste what you find into the "Find" box, and the phrase quickedit pencil will be located for you as shown in the screenshot below (click on screenshot if you want to see an enlarged and clearer version of the screenshot):



Acually, the screenshot above is not searching for something in the template, but just an example I use while preparing this post and as you can see, it can also be used to locate words or phrases in the post editor, not just the template editor. I the above example, I used "quickEdit" to illustrate. If that section is not what you are seeking, just keep on clicking "Next" until you find what you are looking for.

Using the "Find" function in Notepad

If you find the above method not working for the web browser you are using, there is another way to do it using Notepad. In the template editor, click on the inside of the template editor, right-click and choose "Select all to highlight all of the template. Right-click again and select "cut". You will end up with an empty template editor, but the template will be stored in the clipboard. Open a Notepad file, click inside the Notepad file, right-click and select "Paste" and the whole template will then be transferred to the Notepad file.

To find what you are looking for (example "

Backup Page Elements (now called Gadgets): How?

Update: Page Element is now called Gadget.

The upgraded New Blogger (or just plain Blogger) is a big improvement over the old classic Blogger. There is an importance difference you should know between the two:

Backup old classic Blogger templates

Refer to How to backup old classic Blogger template. When you backup the old classic Blogger template, you backup everything that is in it, including any customizations like adding a

visitor counter

Google Adsense products like Google ads (advertisments), search box, referral text or button links

blogrolls which is the name many bloggers use for a list of links to other websites and what the New Blogger calls a Link List, etc.

Backup New Blogger templates PLUS Page Elements

Backing up New Blogger in some ways has been made very much simpler now, especially for those not familiar with things like HTML, CSS, Blogger tags and instructions are at Backup New Blogger template PLUS Page Elements (click BACK button to get back to this page). However, the "backup Page Elements" was not described in details sufficiently, so rather than making an update, I thought it better to publish a separate posts.

Why is it important to backup Page Elements for New Blogger

When you change to a new template, you will often get a warning message that some widgets (Page Elements) will be deleted. If you proceed, you will lose those customizations you did via the Page Elements. However, if had backed up the Page Elements, you can easily put them back again as they will still be in the LAYOUT. This is one small disadvantage of the New Blogger as compared with backing up old classic templates where all the customizations you made are saved and you would not lose anything when you need to put back your back up template.

How to back up Page Elements and what Page Elements can be backed up

Not all Page Elements can be backed up. Some like the Link List, Profile, Archives, cannot be backed up. However, for Profile and Archives, even without backing them up, you can still put them back again even if there were deleted. This is not so for the Link List, which once gone is gone forever. You will have to redo the whole thing from scratch.

Other Page Elements, particularly HTML/Javascript Page Elements can very easily be backed up. All you need to do is to edit the Page Element, copy-paste the content into a Notepad file, save the file in the same folder where you save your backup template. Use a file name that tells you exactly what the Page Element is all about. Make full use of the possibility to use long file names (this wasn't possible in the bad old days).

How to backup "Link List"

You can use the HTML/Javascript to make your "Link List" or what many call "blogroll". Refer to the bottom part of What a grateful blogger did for me without asking. If that is not clear, feel free to leave a comment and I will try to help although now I may be a bit slow in responding because of having too many things to do.