Setting up your blogger account - and your first blog!

Setting up your Blogger account is very easy, but I've provided the screenshots below to guide you through the process.

First of all you have to go to www.blogger.com and create a new account. Remember when you set up your Hotmail or Yahoo account? Well, this is pretty much the same.

To give you an idea of what blogging involves, you might "take a quick tour" first. Choose that link (shown above).

To set up your account, click where it says "Create your account now" (also shown above).

The first screen you get is shown above. Your "user name" and "password" you could make the same as what you are using on Yahoo, or wherever -- which makes it easy to remember them.

Your "display name" is what it says when you post to a blog (what appears on the webpage). Under what you write it will automatically say "posted by" and whatever name you have chosen. I suggest you use your own preferred first name, with a capital letter. My "display name" is Tom, for example.

Accept the "terms" and then click "continue"...



The next screen looks like the one above. Blogger assumes that you actually want to set up your own blog, not just join this one.

I suggest that you choose one of your hobbies and use that as the "blog title" (you can always change it later) -- "Mountain biking in Spain", for example. You'll see another example below -- "Jumping up and down on the bed", my favourite sport when I was a kid!

The "blog address" is the address you will have to go to to see your blog. Don't put any spaces in it -- "mountainbikingspain", for example.



You then have to choose a "template" (screen shown above). The template controls what your blog looks like. You don't get many choices, and you can change your mind afterwards (and will in fact then get more choices). I suggest you choose whichever you think is least horrible!

Click "continue", and then you'll get this:


It really is that simple!

Now you can start "posting" to your newly created blog. The interface looks like this, with lots of those buttons already being familiar to you:

You will need to write something in order to be able to actually view the blog, and have to click "publish post" (not shown above) first. You also get a "save as draft" button, which allows you to save what you've written and post it later.

Don't worry about anything that might puzzle you (like some of the things under the "settings" and "template" tabs, which you can see above). We'll come back to them; but the important thing now is that you have set up the account.

One final thing... Top right, you'll see a link "Back to Dashboard" (circled below):

Your dashboard shows you all of your blogs -- you can have lots of them -- and you can access and edit them from the dashboard. You'll have the one you are now setting up for yourself and our Young Learners blog as soon as you've joined it.

To join the Young Learners blog, by the way, you have to accept the invitation that I'll be sending you to your email address.

My "dashboard" currently looks like this:

You can see the Young Learners blog there, circled in red, on my dashboard -- along with half a dozen of my other blogs.

There's more to learn about blogs, of course -- but we'll be doing exactly that as we go along.