Here is a copy of instructions I sent to my niece about how to start blogging. Useful for anyone starting off :-)

1. Go to www.blogger.com

2. Click on ‘create a blog’. If you have already created a blog, skip to step #1 in the next section

3. Create a username for your login to blogger. This username is something that will never be displayed anywhere. It is only for login purposes.

4. Choose a password

5. Display name is the name which will show up when you post a thought on your blog (posted by RPM, for example). It is also what shows up when you make a comment on someone else’s or your own blog.

6. Click next and choose a title for your blog.

7. Next, choose how your blog address will look like. Make it simple so people can remember the address. Once you choose the address, it will become your blog’s address as something.blogspot.com. If the address you want is not available you may have to try a few alternatives.

8. Clicking on next will show you a list of templates you can choose for your blog. Click on the magnifying glass next to the template to expand the view. There you’ll see how the template looks like. Once you like the template, choose it and click continue.

9. That’s it!

Of course, then you can go into the settings of your blog and customize it.

1. Go to www.blogger.com

2. Login with the username and password selected in #3 above.

3. Click on settings tab at the top.

4. You can enter a description for your blog.

5. You can also add your blog to the directory listings. What this does is makes the blog visible to a lot more people than it would normally. It is kind of putting an ad in the paper for your shop or something. If you want to stay low-profile, you can choose no. If you want to create a splash and have more and more unknown people read your thoughts, then choose yes.

6. Always keep pressing ‘Save settings’

7. Click on ‘publishing’ under ‘settings’. Ping weblogs.com is similar to #5, where it announces to a lot of people that your blog has been updated, when you do update it. Choose yes if you want the world to know that you have updated your blog, and no if you want to keep it subtle.

8. Choose ‘formatting’ under ‘settings’. It would be best to leave it at default.

9. Choose ‘comments’ under ‘settings’. If you want others to be able to comment on your thoughts, choose ‘show’.

10. Under ‘who can comment’, you can choose to let only registered users of blogger make comments. This means, when people want to make a comment, they will have to login to blogger. Anonymous comments will not be allowed. And that is not usually a good thing. So I would say ‘Anyone’. Of course, if you want to make it a truly closed blog, you can choose ‘only members of this blog’ in that option. This means, that you have to set up a list of members who can post to this blog. Only they can make comments to the blog. I had originally tried this but it was not a good option, because I wanted to make a splash and let others/unknowns also make comments. :-)

11. It would be nice to put an email address for notifications as and when someone posts a comment for you.

12. Leave the other tabs on default settings and go to the ‘members’ area. Here you can invite members if you want to make it a closed blog. Only people on this list will be able to make comments and even write posts.

That’s it. It’s that simple.