How to Set Up a Blog Using www.Blogger.com

Why Do We Like Blogger?

It is very simple to use.
Blogger is easy for clients to use once the account is configured and the directories are set up on the web server.
Blogger has nice templates that are free. We recommend that you use these free templates until you get the hang of blogging and the code, and then design your own template. If you are HTML and PHP literate, you will see HTML and PHP code that is recognizable in the template that you can use as you customize your own.
Best of all ... the "Blog This" button is included in the Google Toolbar, making it extraordinarily easy and painless to add to your blog at any time you are surfing on the Web.
Google's Picasa 2 and Hello allow non-tech savvy or just simply busy people to add images painlessly and quickly to their blog on the fly using the "Blog This" button, and without having to open any additional image or FTP applications. We even use these features to add to our own blog quickly and easily!
Blogger is free. Really this is fact is so far down on our list that if we had to pay for Blogger, we would, as the ability to add to our blog with immediacy and with the minimum of effort has the most value to us and our busy clients.

Blogger Set Up

Set Up On Your Own Web Server

A simple interface for configuration is found in the Blogger control panel. Before doing anything, first using FTP we set up a new directory on our own web server called weblogs. Inside we install one plain HTML page called blogger.html and one plain XML file called atom.xml made with an HTML editor. Make sure to put no content on these pages, as Blogger will dynamically write to these pages.

Blogger does the rest once you have set up the correct paths within the Blogger interface. If you want an index for the archive, you may want to set up a file in the same directory called archive.html.

Settings To Use On Blogger

First visit www.Blogger.com and set up your own user account.
Login. Under Settings and in the Basic tab, enter yes to all questions, name your blog and write a catchy description.
Under the Publishing tab, enter the information as below
ftp server: ftp.mydomainname.com
blog URL: http://www.mydomainname.com/weblogs/blogger.html
FTP path: www/weblogs/
blog file name: blogger.html
enter your FTP user name, password, and click yes for notify.
Under the Formatting tab select your date and time stamps, click yes to convert line breaks, show title field, and link field. Leave the template blank.
Under the Comments tab, select your options. We do not show comments on our blog. You can always enable this later once you are up and running.
Under the Archiving tab, select monthly, yes to enable post pages, list your archive path as www/weblogs/archives/, list your archive URL as http://www.mydomainname.com/weblogs/archives/, and your archive file name as archive.html.
Under Site Feed click yes for publish feed and select your length of description, list your site feed server path as www/weblogs/, site feed name as atom.xml, and list your site feed URL as http://www.mydomainname.com/weblogs/atom.xml.
Under the remaining 2 tabs make the selections that you desire for members and mail addresses.
Please remember to replace the words mydomainname with the name of your own domain name. If your website files are listed under another name other than www by your hosting agent use that name instead of www. Some hosting agents call the www file public_html. You would replace all incidents above of www with public_html if that is what your hosting agent has supplied.

Don't forget to print out our bonus PDF condensed guide that you can use as reference while you set up your Blogger account!

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