Day 3

Put a nice new site meter on the blog page. And a rather nifty translator. That's for my Belgian readers! Managed to find and paste a photo from the web, quite easy to do. The blogger site has a few recommended addresses to visit. I basically saved the photo to my pictures and the rest was easy. I dont know if this is the best way to do it but I was happy with it. I put a breakout game on it last night but took it off this morning. I dont want the page to look too clunky. Last night I also asked for readers to introduce themselves so at least I could find out if people are actually reading. I had responses from 2 people, one read my request on the forum and the other just stumbled upon my blog. Had a brief look at technorati, because it had been recommended but decided to leave it for another day.

Day 2

Intresting day. I looked and looked for the widget that lets you know who is visiting your page. It always took me back to blogcatalog, which I didn't really look at because I thought it was just another blog site. So I wanted to get something to tell me how many hits my blog is getting. This is called a site meter and I found a free one on sitemeter.com. It took me a while to paste it into the html but I was trying to paste it onto the end of a piece of code. What I should have done is clicked enter after the line so there was a space to actually paste the code into. Once I had worked that out I found the icon for site meter at the foot of my blog and a click took me straight to the site and I could see how many hits I had recieved today.
8.
Next I looked at how to increase traffic to my page. I took 2 pieces of advice:
1) Introduce myself to the bogger comunity by saying Hi! on the coffee shop forum.
2) Sign up for blogcatalog!
One of the first things this does is give you access to the bloody thing I started out looking for this morning! I still wasnt sure if this was allowed but I did see a blogspot blog with it yesterday and the blogcatalog site has google adsense on it so I thought what the heck!
As it happens you can't sign up with blogcatalog until you paste one of three widgets onto your blog. So I also signed this one up as well and you can see the results at the foot of the blog page. Hopefully it will be yourself you can see!
It will take a few days until I find out if my blog has been accepted into the blogcatalog community. I also decided to change the look of my blog. It was easy enough but the little sitemeter icon is now missing from the bottom of the page. Wisely, I had put sitemeter into my favourites so it's just a case of clicking on that for the info.

Things to do:
more widgets
more photos
sign up to similar sites like blogcatalog

Day 1

Saw that you can add twitter to your blog page. As twitter seems to be on everyones lips at the moment I decided to add it to In Flanders. Only a slight problem. I uploaded an advert and couldn't work out how to let everyone know I was doing something. What I needed to do was click on the add widget button at the bottom of the advert. Once again I was relieved at the ease it took to add it to my blog. You can find twitter via the gadgets button but be sure to type it into the search engine because it would take you ages to trawl through the different gadgets to find it.
Feeling pleased with myself I decided to upload a photo or two. This was easy as well, you can find the button you need on the create post page. It is the 3rd icon in from the blue 'preview' button. The box that opens up gives you the option of how to place your photo and also the choice to upload a total of 5 photos. I messed around with 3 but didnt like them all on top of each other so just left one in and will add others over time.

things to do:
Find out if I can change the layout of the posts.
Find out how to add followers photos to the tiny boxes on the blog page.
Make the page look a bit more professional.
Find out how to get more visitors to the page.

What has gone before.....

So a brief heads-up on what I've been doing so far. I actually started my first blog 4 days ago after a brief time researching blog sites. Everyone seemed to agree that Blogger.com was the best. If you are with Blogger then you will know that it is easy to use. Actually getting up and running was as simple as could be. I had no problems whatsoever. Spent some time writing a couple of posts but didn't stretch myself. Yesterday, a monday, I posted a longer entry and decided to start a blog about writing a blog. Thats right, just like this one! I decided to start it on Squido and wished I hadn't because it was really difficult for me to navigate around the tools etc. I managed a post but really couldn't be bothered with it after that. It was the complete opposite to Blogger. If I had gone there first I may not have even started a blog. Having said that I did go to the site after having spent a long time in front of the computer so I may have just been tired.
Last night my fiance, Dominica, here after known as Do, read me some responses she had recieved from friends about my blog. That was nice.

About

I am intrested to find out if it's possible to make a successful blog from scratch without knowing what the hell you are doing! I would say that I have a fair level of computer literacy. But blogs and me haven't crossed paths before now. I have already started a blog about me and living in Belgium but I would really like to do a blog on one of my favourite subjects and that is esoterica and folklore. So this blog is a journal of the pitfalls and pratfalls of creating a blog by a beginner.