Blogging 101 - Getting Started

Wow, you've managed to set up your blog and make your first entry into it. Great! But now it looks boring, and you want to spice up the appearance of your blog. What do you do? Go to the template's page, of course! What's that? You didn't click on the template button yet? Well, what are you waiting for? Click it! There we go. Upon clicking on the "template" button, you should be treated to this lovely visual feast:

Pretty intimidating, huh? That text field contains HTML, the code that is used to build all websites. This site was written in HTML too! For someone who doesn't know html, it can be very scary looking, and that's why I'm asking you now to not mess with the template text field directly unless you know what you are doing or unless I am giving you specific instructions on what to do. You might mess something up, and then instead of being the boring white page your blog is now, it won't work at all! There are two ways to edit your template: the first is the method i just advised against, directly editing the HTML. the second is much easier and we're going to try it right now!

See at the upper right of the screen where it says "choose new template"? that tab takes you to the template choice screen, similar to the one you used to pick your plain template when you first started. Click on that link now. It will take you to a screen that looks like this:

Look familiar? Of course! Here you can apply various different templates, including ones that weren't available to you when you were first setting up. If you can't really tell how a certain template is going to look, click on the click on the preview image. a sample blog will pop up, showing you how the template looks. If you find one you link, feel free to go ahead and click on the "use" button directly below it. it will open up a warning window that will say "warning: your current template will be replaced and any customizations you've made will be lost. do you wish to continue?" click yes and it will automatically set your blog to that template, and bring you back to the html editing screen that we first looked at on this page. you'll have to go back to the "post" tab and click the orange "publish" button again before your changes will take effect.

Later on, in the example area of my site, i will provide you with a fake blog and a template you can "borrow" if you so wish. It's up to you which template you use; blogging is all about making it personal.

we're not going into the archive index template, as it's optional, a bit more complex, and recommended more for advanced users rather than beginners.

You've changed the template and posted, and our basic tutorial is almost over. Now onto page 3, where we learn how to mess around with the settings without messing them up!

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