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I think I’m starting to sound a little bit too much like a Google fan. Or maybe an everything online fan. . . Why golly gee! Don’t you just love it all?

So here is my hard hitting review along with some notes on how to use Google’s Blogger; well, not really. I still really like it and will be using it myself as well as continuing my explorations with WordPress.

Blogger won’t give you all the endless options of a WordPress blog; if you are already use WordPress I would suggest that you stick with it. The endless choices of plugins and themes at WordPress.org or .com might be hard to give up. Blogger doesn’t have nearly as many of those neat widgets and things (called gadgets there).

Where Blogger shines is as platform for beginners, either beginning bloggers or anyone who wants to put up their first website. It’s free, unless you want a custom URL which you can buy from a Google partner or anywhere else you like. And a url can start at as little as $10.00 a year.

Redirecting the URL I already owned to my blogspot address gave me a big headache and took way longer than it should have, but what can I say, it was my first time. The help and instructions from Blogger might not be perfect for this as each registrar has this set up a little differently, but with a little thought most people should be able to figure it out. If not, hopefully the teenager next door is a helpful kind of kid. If you buy your url from the partner there this should be done for you anyway and won’t be a problem.

It is very easy to change the look of the blogger templates. Even the advanced features are straight forward. A nice touch is the button on every element that you can change, that lets you return it back to its default. And of course there is a window that lets you view your changes live as you make them. No problem there.

The biggest problems I had, had to do with the design tab. Couldn’t find the darn thing for the life of me. My mistake. It was there all along; I had to hit the view blog button before it showed up right there in the top menu bar of my page up on the right.

In Blogger help I found a post that said the ‘gadgets’ are under the design tab and they are sort of, but really you need to go to layout. In the new interface it is in the left hand side menu under Earnings. In the layout page you will see ‘Add a gadget’ in the spaces in the layout that don’t have content (not the white areas). Click on that link and a window will open with a list of the available gadgets.

From your design page you can download a backup of your template. You can also export your blog in the Blogger Atom format. Do this periodically so that you have a backup files for both your blog text and one for your layout on your home computer. Keeping your images in a Picassa web album should allow you to get your site back up easily should disaster strike. If you don’t want to use Picassa keep a back up file of your blog jpgs on your home computer or hard drive.

My new art blog using Blogger is now up at emschumacher.com . I didn’t do a whole lot to change one of the basic templates here. I like to keep things really simple when I am showing art work.

To see how far Blogger design can be stretched check out this post at Blogger Buzz.