(More like how to customize a new blog in Blogger)
Open Blogger.com and click on "Create a Blog":
Enter your blog title and address:
Choose a template (don't worry you can change this later):
Congratulation you have a blog:
Click on "start posting now" – but don't start posting…
Open Settings->Basic:
Here you can change the basic settings for your blog.
Don't forget to save the settings on the bottom.
Publishing
If you have a domain you can publish your blog to that domain.
If you don't have a domain you can buy one with GoDaddy
If you have my luck you might have to produce an ID and a bank statement but I received my domain after about 3 days.
Site Feeds
Most of the professional bloggers around won't visit your blog directly but use a feed reader (such as Google Reader or even Microsoft Outlook). The blog automatically creates those feeds according to the content you publish in your blog.
Site statistics however depend on the people who visit your site directly – What to do?
For that there is FeedBurner:
FeedBurner creates a kind of a tunnel between the user and your blog RSS feed.
What you do is in your blog you give your users the FeedBurner's feed and that one tunnels your readers to the blog's feed (all the while adding statistics).
How to create a FeedBurner feed?
Enter your blog:
And click Next (be sure not to change the permission of your blog (I once opened the blog only to myself and the FeedBurner couldn't find my blog's feed)).
Now it asks you to choose between the two different feeds it found in your site. Since I don't really know the difference between Atom and RSS I usually flip a coin (if you know the difference or know what is better please let me know):
Hit Next…
Yet another Next…
Now that you have a feed copy it:
And Paste it to your blog settings:
Go back to the FeedBurner and hit Next, I usually choose these settings:
And hit a final Next.
Be sure to check that it works by subscribing to your feed. You should see something like:
Another sure way to test that FeedBurner is working is simply to look at the feed:
In the url line click on the feed icon:
Clicking on either one should bring you to your RSS reader page (for me it’s Google):
There you can see the URL of your feed:
As you can see the feed is taken from FeedBurner.
Google Analytics
Another tool that helps you know the statistics of your site is Google Analytics. Unlike FeedBurner this tool works by adding a script to your page that contacts the Google Analytics site and "lets it know" that you have a visitor to your site.
The only downsize I found is this little comment: (5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.)
Open: http://www.google.com/analytics/ and click 
Now on the top right corner select "Create New Account…"
Click Sign up:
Enter your information:
Enter more information (why twice?):
Read the terms and agree to them (or disagree and ignore the next lines (it's your choice)).
And hit Create New Account.
Now you get this page:
Copy the code from 2 and save it somewhere safe.
Click Save and Finish
Don't worry the "!" mark is ok – we will fix it later:
Now go back to your blog->Design->Page Elements:
Click on one of the Add Gadgets:
Choose the Html/JavaScript (click on the blue +):
And paste the script :
Don’t enter a title!
Preview the change to make sure you did it correctly (the blog still looks like a blog?).
And then save the template.
Now lets check that it works:
Go back to Google Analytics, and click edit on your blog:
Click on the top right button:
This is a successful installed state:
Email Posting
One of my favorite things about Blogger is the ability to send posts by emails, it is set from here:
For my real blog I set it to save as draft but for my notes blog I set it to "publish emails immediately". No matter what be sure to write good secret words otherwise you might get some spam…
Archiving
Ever wondered what Archiving does?
Well I did…
And it actually means how the Blog Archive Gadget from:
works, it is showing the posts by months, weeks or days.
Edit: Changed the adding of the script of Google Analytics to something less dangerous (the font is different because I didn’t use word…).
Keywords: blog, blogger, publishing, feed, feedburner, Google Analytics, Email Posting, Archieve, Setup
