My Experience in Blog Making

Creating this blog wasn’t too difficult. That is because about a week ago I started building my first blog and from that experience had figured out some of the basics of blog building. My first is a book review/random fun blog that I made since my friends and I love sharing YA books that we’ve read but don’t always have time to talk about them. We thought using blogs would be a fun way for us to share our thoughts and maybe later we could combine our review entries and share them with students or patrons at the libraries we work at. I must have spent at least 10 hours playing around with that blog and I still haven’t gotten very far on it. I found a lot of fun things to add to it though like an iPod that plays YouTube links. (You can find the iPod at http://www.mixpod.com/ .) I left a link to my book review blog on the side bar of this blog just in case anyone reading this is interested in checking it out once it gets farther along. I have blog links to a lot of really great YA book review sites on my other blog too which might be worth taking look at if you have time!


By the time I started this blog I already had a pretty good feel for how things work, which made putting this together very easy. I did, however, decide to play around with a few things to give my blog a bit of uniqueness to it.
First of all, I wanted something different than the generic templates that Blogger gives you, so I went searching for a unique background. I used the site http://www.pyzam.com/ and found this particular wolf template. Pyzam gives you step by step instructions on how to do the transfer, so it was really easy to transfer the html code from that site into Blogger.


For the header at the top of the page I used one of the pictures I took on vacation and tweaked it using the photo site http://www.picnik.com/. I figured that by using my own photograph there would be no copy right issues. The only problem I had was trying to size the picture correctly. I found myself loading the picture into Blogger, finding it was too large for my page, going back to my saved picture to resize it, and then reloading it into Blogger multiple times. After several tries I finally got it to a size I liked.


I left the followers tag up on my side bar just in case someone wants to follow this blog. I’ll think about adding other gadgets as time goes on but right now this is just a blog for a school project so there really isn’t a need for any of that. Most of the fun gadgets I find will be on my other blog page.


Over all, I think that once you get started, blogs are pretty easy to make and maintain and can be quite fun and useful.