"9 Edge Down" Comes To Life

Step 1, according to Greyhawk, is to “Get A Blog.” Since Blogger is free, that sounds good to me.

I took a short detour to my local library, however, and picked up a book called “Essential Blogging” [ISBN 0-596-00388-9]. It has 6 authors. It is published by O’Reilly & Associates. [UPDATE: Amazon.com lists the lead author as Shelley Powers. The authors in total are Shelley Powers, Cory Doctorow, J. Scott Johnson, Mena G. Trott, Benjamin Trott, Rael Dornfest.]

The book compares various tools. And it has a few chapters about Blogger. That looked like a good addition to the help files.

In true engineering fashion, I jump right in without reading the book or the help files.

Creating a blog was pretty simple. Using the standard template got me up and running in a hurry.

I’ve worked a bit with client portals, so the notion of having to “publish” the pages before they show up wasn’t a foreign concept.

What I wanted first on the list is to control comments. While part of the blogosphere is the interaction, and I welcome suggestions and comments, I don’t really want to get long political arguments started.

One of the options in the settings was to restrict comments “to members of this blog.” No problem, registration is free, let’s look at that process by creating a second user.

So I sent an “invitation” to my business email ID. My assumption is that I create an authorization list for commentors.

But after I answered the email, accepting the invitation, my new id appears as a contributor, a co-author, who can create new posts. That isn’t what I had in mind.

I don’t want to open it up to the whole world, yet, so I changed the settings to “registered users.” Now you need a Blogger ID, but that’s the only restriction.

I played around with comments. It appears the administrator can delete comments, there’s a trash can icon. Another commentor can only delete the comments he/she added. The trash can only shows up on their comments.

So, right from the start it was useful for me to have two IDs.

Now, off to monkeying with the graphics.