A new blogger's log: Week 1

Sunday, July 20
Bought The Everything Blogging Book. It's pretty basic. However, one advantage is that it is so far from being intimidating that I was encouraged to dive right in. Right away, it was clear that the easiest way to get started was to sign in at Google Blogger. A few minutes later, my template was up and running.

Tuesday, July 22
My first post! However, I'm concerned that the analytical & research oriented posts that I'm likely to focus on will likely take way more time than I bargained for.

Wednesday, July 23
Added a category list and links to my favorite blogs to my sidebar. Blogger help told me all I needed to know.
Submitted my blog/URL to Google, Yahoo and IceRocket.
E-mailed an old friend who is an experienced blogger asking for a few pointers.

Found a great site that has lots of Blogger tips. His input was very helpful in choosing a package to monitor traffic. I chose StatCounter. Unfortunately, the results are pretty discouraging when there is no traffic to count.

Thursday, July 24
My friend overachieved. He has started a series of posts for beginning bloggers on his site. His first post in the series is The Importance of Links. He was nice enough to give me a referral in his post. So, ... now there are actually Stats to be Counted! The reader statistics from StatCounter are impressive. They tell me everything I want to know at this point -- and then some.

Friday, July 25
Soon after installing StatCounter, maybe by coincidence, I started having problems signing in to Blogger. Blogger help suggested deleting cookies and enabling JavaScript. Didn't help. However, going into my Norton Utility software and making Blogger a trusted site seems to have solved the problem.

The only other problem so far is that my "about me" is a jumble and I haven't yet figured out how to format it. Too bad Blogger doesn't handle "about me" the same way it handles posts....


Note: This week's log was written after the fact. Next week I will log daily, but post only at the end of the week. The results should be more useful.