Starting a Blog - Day 1

Day 1

To start with, I think this baby looks a little dull.

 So let's fix that.
This is what my Blogger home page looks like. I took the liberty of finding and opening the more options tab, because that looked like a place I could customize at. Template looks like a good place to start.

So here I am at my template screen. I'm going to select something that looks like it has a style that appeals to me, then edit it in layout. After some consideration, I selected the first one under “Watermark” and began customizing from there.

I'll deal with customizing the pictures and background later. I want my own design, so I might have to spend a bit of time dicking around in whatever knock-off version of photoshop I can scrounge up, but for now I need to look at the layout and gadgets here. I don't like how the blog archive is set up, so I'd like to either remove it or completely change how it looks, and add things like a “featured articles” section or an easy navigation part. I head on over to Layout for that.

On the right is the blog archive section, so I hit edit. Not finding any option I like that makes it bearable, I just remove it. The page seems to have some issues with my continued editing, so I refresh and head back to layout again, to find it successfully removed. Good. Now for a quick edit of my “About Me” section. All I've done is added a quick description. I also like simplicity, so I select a different body layout. The second in line, so that I only have a header, a main body, and a column for navigation purposes.

Apparently I can add gadgets by going to Design > Page elements, as the helpful text tells me, so let's go do that. In reality, I go all the way back to the options tab an hit Layout to find a way to add the gadgets.

In the column with “About Me,” I want to add a picture above the description and a list of links to various pages and sections in the blog below. A header right below the title might be nice too—I want to allow people to go to standalone pages on the home page, projects, how to contact me, or whatever else I might add in the future. Luckily, all of these features are easy to get. I played around a bit before deciding which gadgets suited my purposes best, so I can't really give an exact answer as to which ones I decided on.

I uploaded a picture and added a link to the projects list, then made a few pages for my header. Here's what it looks like now:

And that's it for today. So far I'm doing good on the "post every day" front, and I'm starting to change up the look of the blog a bit. I'll be working more on that tomorrow, giving it a proper background and header, possibly thinking of a personal design of some kind, and looking at maybe adding an RSS feed.