Using Blogger

As the light fades on the first day of my new blog, it crossed my mind, that to-days visitors have come here from varies links. Some of you will be frequent bloggers who are familiar with the format and what its all about. Others may have "popped in" for a look having responded to an email invite and of course some of you may have followed a link from else-where.

Blogger was launched in 1999 by Pyra Labs and taken over by Google in 2003. The general idea of a blog can be thought of as an online diary, it has become a popular format in recent years and is often used by individuals rather than having a traditional website. Its free service to both writer and reader, funded by the Google advertising empire

This section you are reading is the current "post". A post is like a diary entry and they are organised with the newest entry at the top, therefore as you scroll down the page the entries get older.
Down the right are various "Gadgets" ...
The top gadget at the moment, gives direct news feeds from the BBC website, so you can see what is happening in the world.
There is also a gadget called "Blog archive" which is a quick index to all the posts or entries that have been made.
"Followers" are other bloggers who have elected to be kept upto date with posts I am making.

At the bottom of each post is a comment option, clicking on this opens a list of other peoples comments and a box for you to make a comment yourself. You will be asked to select a profile to comment as, if you don't have a google profile, no problem, select anonymous, but it would be good if you could give me a clue who you are within the text you write! In the last step of commenting you will be asked to copy the letters in a jumbled up box of letters. The only reason for this is to make sure you are a human, not a computer trying to send me lots of junk mail !