Blogging 101 - Advanced Placement

Great, so now you're a full fledged blogger. I'll assume you have been practicing your blogging now for several weeks, enough to know everything I showed you in the getting started page inside and out. Child's play? Wonderful! So let's take a look at the advanced stuff that's out there for you. I'm not going to give you step by step instructions here; you don't need me to hold your hand. I'm just going to show you where all these things are, what they do, and why you might want them. That's fair enough, right?

Let's say you're tired of Blog*Spot. You want image hosting, file space, custom domains, all that good stuff that comes with having a webserver. But you don't have one. You can go with free hosting, but there are tons of sacrifices you would have to make. Some, like Geocities, don't allow FTP access, which you'll want if you're running an advanced website. Some don't allow Blogger. Some don't allow scripts. A lot of them are slow and unreliable, they limit hard drive space and bandwidth, and JUST ABOUT ALL of them add ads to your pages, potentially ruining them. Your best bet, I would say, is to find a cheap, reliable pay webhost. Who would I recommend? Well, I'm hosted by Pawhosting. It's low cost, very reliable, and the tech support is quick and helpful. They allow CGI, PERL, PHP, and all those other acronym goodies that only a true webmaster could love. I'd really recommend them, and I doubt you'd find a better price for comparable service. And no, I'm NOT being paid to endorse them.

You're also going to want to register a domain. The price ranges on this vary, but I got good service from Go Daddy. Try for a dot com if you want people to find your site easier, and make it easy to remember.

After you get your new host, you need to get ftp access. A good, free ftp program is WS_FTP LE. That should be all you need to get started with a different site.

You want to design your own template; you want to spruce up your existing template; you want to do SOMETHING to your template! You're not alone. Check out Macromedia's Dreamweaver. I'm not going to teach you how to use it. That's up to you. The "ooh, what does this button do?" technique, as always, helps greatly. What do i mean? You open up Dreamweaver, create a new page, and just keep trying out all the different buttons till you know what everything does. Hey, that's how I learned how to use it, so it can't be that bad.

If you don't want to design your new template, but you just want to get a new one, go to Blogskins.com. They've got tons and tons of templates that other users made for blogger, and then decided to put up for other people to use. The template that I used for my fake blog is up there too, under the title "tri-max". The great thing about blogskins is that when you sign up you enter your blog information and then it applies the templates automatically at the press of a button.

There's so much more stuff you can do with blogger; this is just the beginning. Keep surfing the web, keep looking for new things, and most importantly, keep blogging!