Blogs can have many purposes. They can be on-line diaries (the word is a contraction of web log). They can be photo albums. They can track the progress of various events, such as a missions trip, the growth of a child, travel. Often they list web information that the blogger has recently visited. They can be the equivalent of newspaper reports or opinion columns. They can be used by classes, either by the teacher or by students. The teacher can post regularly to a blog, and expect students to subscribe to it, rather than e-mailing. Each student can post to her blog, and the teacher can subscribe to all of them, and see who has done what on one subscription page. There are many other possible uses.

If you get to a blog through a link to a specific post, you can delete the part of the URL that specifies the post, and get to the main page that way. (The main page has the latest post, and allows you to get to all the other posts of the blog.) Some blogs have a Main button or link.

Blogs usually have provision for comments on posts by visitors. These comments usually allow for a link to the visitor's blog or home page. Some blogs show the comments as you scroll through, but some require clicking on a link to the comments. Some bloggers comment on their own blogs, usually to add something that wasn't in the original post, or to respond to a comment.

Getting information: RSS feeds:
I recommend that you use Bloglines for subscribing to RSS feeds. There are other ways. You must register (it's free) with your e-mail address and a password. The password doesn't need to be anything fancy--it's difficult for me to see any great harm coming to you if someone figures it out and uses your Bloglines log-in. However, you should not use a password already used for log-ins demanding security, such as to your bank or e-mail account. If someone gets access to your e-mail, they can have your password e-mailed to them, with no security check before it's mailed, so that they could obtain the password. If that same password is also used for other purposes, that could be dangerous.

I don't believe I have ever received any e-mail, junk or otherwise, which can be attributed to my subscription to Bloglines, except for when I forgot my password, which they quickly e-mailed to me.

Bloglines keeps track of RSS feeds you have subscribed to. It allows you to check one web page for a quick summary (usually--sometimes you get the whole post) of all your feeds. If you don't want to look at it, you won't see that item again, unless it's re-posted. If you want to look at something later, one mouse-click lets you keep it. You can change your subscriptions, or organize them into folders, any time. You can e-mail the URL and a summary of an item to anyone, provided you have their e-mail address. Once you sign up, you can access your feeds from any computer with web access.

On computers that allow cookies (and ours seem to) after a successful log in or two to Bloglines, you won't have to log in again. Just go to Bloglines. The Bloglines page will say Welcome Your Name at the top.

Search Engine Watch named Bloglines the best Blog/Feed search engine on March 31, 2005. (Google does include blog posts in its searches, but they usually don't show up until days or weeks after the post. Most posts show up through Bloglines in hours, once Bloglines picks up your blog, which may take several days.)

There are other ways to subscribe, besides Bloglines. This page lists 20 or more readers/whatever. The page occasionally lists sources of feeds, as well. It has its own feed, but posts are infrequent.

How does subscribing differ from having a regular e-mail message sent to you? There are several advantages to subscribing. First, the smaller number of entities know your e-mail address, the less spam you will get. Second, you are not clogging up your e-mail, which you probably use for business or personal communication, with information that isn't one of these. You only look for your subscriptions when you choose to. Third, you won't be using the storage capacity of your e-mail system. Fourth, you can access your subscriptions anywhere with a web connection, even if the computer doesn't have the software needed for your e-mail. Fifth, saving a feed to a folder may be more straightforward than saving an e-mail message.

In many cases, subscribing also differs from visiting a web page on a regular basis. One such difference is that visiting many web pages includes seeing ads. Most feeds are ad-free. Another difference is that, once you get into the habit of checking your subscriptions, you don't have to remember to check each web page. Still another difference is that you can keep the feed by checking the box for it in Bloglines, and it will stay there, while, if you go back to a changing web page, what you wanted may be gone entirely.

(Tracking packages and subscribing to podcasts with Bloglines, neither of which I have tried, are described here.)

A word on the simplest way to subscribe. When you sign in to Bloglines, after you click My Feeds, you will see a tip taking up the main frame, on the right. (There's also a tips button near the bottom of the left frame.) I'm not sure which tip you will see, but there aren't very many of them. Keep clicking on the next tip link at the top right, until you see the Bloglines Subscribe Button tip. Depending on your browser, pick one of the buttons, and do what it tells you to do. In Explorer, you can right-click, and this will add a new Favorite to your list of Favorites. (You'll have to confirm it.) The procedure is slightly different for Firefox. After you have installed the subscribe button, when you find a page with a feed, you can click on the special favorite that adds it to your list of feeds, and that's it. (If there is more than one feed, you choose to subscribe to a particular one. If you want more, go back to the page and subscribe to another.)

The procedure described in the above paragraph works only after you have gone through these steps on a particular computer. If you want this feature on your office or home computer, you'll have to repeat this procedure. This is not true of subscriptions.  Subscriptions are global. Once you have created a Bloglines page, that page will have all your feeds, regardless of the computer you use to access the page.

You can experiment. Try a feed for a while. If nothing shows up after a reasonable period (careful--The Philosopher's Magazine feed, for example, is quarterly, not weekly or daily) or if you aren't finding anything interesting or useful, unsubscribe by selecting it in Bloglines and clicking on the unsubscribe link near the top right.

This method doesn't work for all blogs. I have found that it doesn't work for Xanga blogs. However, there is an easy way to subscribe to a Xanga blog, once you have the page available. Just click on the Tips link (at the bottom of your subscription list, in the left frame), then on Next Tip until you get to the Subscribe tip. This is a dialog box, which allows you to enter the name (not the URL) of a Xanga blog, and click on the Subscribe button. This is also supposed to work for LiveJournal subscriptions.

If you have found a feed that is relevant to a class (That happens all the time in Bioethics, and happened regularly in Ethics and professional issues in computing. It may not happen so often in some of your classes!) check the feed in Bloglines, then call up and project your Bloglines page in class, and go to and project the feeds you want to show. (NPR, and other sources, have audio segments, if you want to use them.)

So where do you get the feeds? There are lots of them. The New York Times, for example, offers 28 RSS feeds. (See this page. You can just use the Subscribe with Bloglines favorite/bookmark, then subscribe, to choose which feed you want.) They include Automobiles, Business, Editorials, and Science. I subscribe to the Science feed, which gives me access to a half dozen or so posts each day, generally. You can also subscribe through Bloglines by searching for New York Times Books (or whatever it is) then hit the Bloglines subscribe button. You can also add a feed by pasting that URL into the Add function of your Bloglines page. The same procedure works for other news organizations. I have tried it for CBS and the CBC, and I suspect it will work for CNN, NBC, ABC, Fox, Reuters, and the BBC, but I haven't tried those. This page has about 50 National Public Radio feeds, including programs, topics, and some local stations. Most of these are audio.

Still another tip is the Recommended Feeds tip, which is supposed to be based on your current subscriptions.

RSS Compendium has a list of a few hundred sources of feeds, categorized by type, and with links. This is the best overall source I have found.

Tapestry provides feeds for over a dozen popular comic strips. Other comics can be obtained in other ways.

I subscribe to The Window in the Garden Wall--A C. S. Lewis Blog, which posts quotations from Lewis every day, and, occasionally, interesting facts about Lewis, or a link to another site.

The ESV Bible has feeds for reading the Bible through in a year (I've been doing that since July 2004, using this feed) and for Verse of the Day. Search Bloglines for ESV Bible, and you can subscribe from the result, or go to the link at the beginning of this paragraph, select a feed, and Subscribe. The Bible Gateway has daily Bible verses, but doesn't feature a feed for reading the Bible through in a year.

The World History Blog has a daily feed on some aspect of history, with a link to a good article on that subject. Factmonster has a Today in History page. InfoPlease has a This Day in History page. There is a Words: Today in Literature page.

Christianity Today has an RSS feed. Posts include religion news, opinion, and frequent movie reviews (that's right!).

Some of the channels don’t have RSS feeds, but most of them do, and you may find interesting articles even if there are no feeds. If there is a feed, you can subscribe with the Favorite from your browser. The quality is spotty. Some of their Guides post every day, and do it well, some not so often, or not so well. Even if the quality is good, clicking on the Bloglines entry doesn’t get you to the page you want, but to a page that links to the article, but you can get there eventually. I personally subscribe to their feeds on Philadelphia and San Diego, which keep me up-to-date on touristy stuff in the areas where our daughters live, on Physics, which posts news or problems every few days, and on Christianity, which is not evangelical, but often has some good ideas. (There are also pages on Christian Teens and Christian Music. I haven’t checked them.) As I say, there are lots, probably hundreds of feeds, on many subjects.

Rebecca Writes is a good devotional blog (usually--sometimes she does other things) using a variety of items, including American historical devotional literature. You can subscribe by doing a Bloglines search.

Wittenberg Gate, Evangelical Outpost, and Parableman are serious theological blogs. They don't always agree with each other. Marla Swoffer and Allthings2all are good Christian blogs. Here are a couple of devotional blogs: The Path and K's Cafe: The 30 Second Blog. I got The Path from a comment the author made on one of my postings, and K's Cafe from a search for 84:11 (So I could find references to this verse from Psalms.) K's Cafe has more frequent posts, and they cover all sorts of things: recipes, photos, Bible studies. I'm sure there a lot more good blogs out there.

The Christian Carnival is a weekly post, linking to about 60 blogs per week, with summary information. A different blog serves as host each week. There is a web page, here, linking to previous Carnivals. This blog reliably posts information on upcoming Carnivals.

There are plenty of political blogs out there, of all types. They are the main reason that "blog" has become an important word. I personally subscribe to only one, by a rather frantic atheist, just to read something from a different worldview.

Arts & Letters Daily is a gateway to serious articles, including book reviews, mostly in the humanities and current affairs. The Subscribe Favorite will yield feeds in several categories. One category is SciTech Daily, a related on-line gateway. Arts Journal is another gateway with feeds.

Blogging about Incredible Blogs does brief reviews of all sorts of blogs. The site has a "Subscribe with Bloglines" button. The Librarian's Index to the Internet has a weekly feed of new reviewed web sites. So does Neat New Stuff (You can't subscribe to this directly with the Favorites/Bookmarks tool)

Project Gutenberg has a feed, almost daily, of public domain books, of many kinds, that you can download for reading, searching, etc. Some of them include illustrations, which are also public domain. Be careful that you subscribe to a feed that is current with today's date--there are about a half dozen feeds, and not all are valid. Sorry.

If anyone is interested in the blogs of SWU students, recent alumni, and employees, I subscribe to about two dozen of these, and can give you that information, or you can get it from . Most don't post regularly. I would be very interested in hearing about such blogs--I doubt if I have found all of them. Here is a link to my current subscriptions (too many!). Scroll down to SWU, if interested.

Sports Illustrated has an RSS feed, and, no, the feed doesn't include pictures from the swimsuit issue. Go to the previous link, and subscribe, or search Bloglines for Sports Illustrated. ESPN also has RSS feeds. Time has feeds. So does Newsweek/MSNBC. The New Yorker and The Atlantic do. Harper's does, and, yes, it includes Harper's Index, one month behind. US News doesn't. Christianity Today says it does, but it hasn't posted for months. (See the previous link if you want daily information from Christianity Today.)

RSS Weather has feeds for many cities in North America. Pick one, and Subscribe. For my taste, there are too many posts, but if you want the weather, that's one way to get it, without the ads from the Weather Channel.

All Recipes has daily feeds of different categories of recipes. These can be printed out in various sizes.

CowPi Quotes has a daily quote feed. Infoplease offers a feed with today in history, notable birthdays, and other goodies.

blogwithoutalibrary lists RSS feeds relating to libraries

Feeds I haven't tried long enough yet, or at all:
Purina has separate feeds on cat and dog care and feeding. You can't use the Subscribe button to get these.

Yahoo offers RSS feeds based on mutual fund or stock symbols. Apparently, you can only subscribe to one symbol's feed at a time through Bloglines. SmartMoney has several feeds, but I'm not sure they are different from each other. Do a Bloglines search for SmartMoney.

Melanie Spiller's blog is on English usage. She hasn't posted since March 1. ebnWL news is the Educational Blogger's Network. Weblogg-ed News is on using blogs in elementary and secondary education. The Write Weblog is by a teacher using blogs to teach writing. The blogroll links to writing by actual middle school (I think) students. The names of all the other feeds in this section tell enough of what the subscription is about.

The US State Department and the US Department of Education have feeds.

Many blogs have blogrolls. Try clicking on some of the blogs listed by a blog you already are interested in. That will probably bring you some more like the first one. I found Noelle Stephens' blog from Laura Tossey's blogroll.

Many posts have links to posts from other blogs. Try clicking on some of those.

Most blogs will automatically open a new window, so you don't lose the current page.

If something you want is not included above, and it probably isn't, I suggest a Google search for "topic RSS feeds." When you find a URL, Add it to your Bloglines feeds, with the subscribe button or the subscribe tip.

Be brave. Subscribe to some feeds that you don't agree with much.

If you really want to know what I subscribe to, it's all here. (And I subscribe to too many feeds!) You can make some or all of your subscriptions private, but I haven't done so. The feeds in the last category (Other) are mostly stuff that I am not terribly interested in myself, but that some of you might be. You can just go to that page and subscribe using the Subscribe with Bloglines favorite/bookmark for each feed you want.

One type of feed you can subscribe to is a Search. You can, for instance, search for Flannery O'Connor Christian with Bloglines. If so, the first time you do it, you will probably get hundreds of hits. (You may decide that your search needs to be changed somewhat.) If you subscribe to that feed, however, you will only get new items that match, and you can treat each of these like any other feed--ignore, or check it to save it. A Bloglines search does not search the web in general, just feeds.

As of late June, 2005, I've noticed that Bloglines doesn't seem to be as effective in searching as it used to be (As far as I can tell, it seems to notify me of new complete posts as well as ever, but it isn't returning keyword searches as well as it used to, it seems--for example, some of my own stuff hasn't shown up in keyword searches for several days.). This report, from Search Engine Watch, indicates that there are 2 million or more "articles" per day posted to blogs. It also indicates that there will be progress in searching this summer. I hope so.

Technorati also searches only RSS feeds.

You can use Google to search, also.

If you know that a particular Blog has a post, but can't find it, Blogger blogs (There's an image with Blogger and a goofy-looking B in the upper left corner of Blogger blogs) have an internal Google search. In other words, you can use Google to automatically search within that blog's posts.

OK, so what if you subscribe to something you decide you don't want? Delete the feed.

Here's how. There's an Edit link in the left frame (where your feeds are listed). Click on it, and then click on the square to the left of the feed you want to delete. Now click on the Finished link, in the same place. You can also use Edit to put feeds in a Folder. (For example, all the Weather feeds, or all the News or Comics feeds, or whatever you want to do.) Edit allows you to also put a feed which was in a folder at top level.

Bloglines normally only shows you a posting once. If you don't click on the Keep This box at the lower right corner (in Bloglines, not in the post itself) it's usually gone. However, there are a couple of ways to get most post summaries back. One is to change the time from 24 hours to a week, say, and then click on the Display button. Another is to click on the main title of the Blog, which will take you directly to the latest version of the entire blog. You can then scroll down until you find the post you want. In some blogs, there is a list of recent posts at the right.

Be careful. For some blogs, once you don't keep a particular feed, you can't get it back. For others, you can change the time from 24 hours to 72, or a week, or something, and you'll get the feeds back. I don't know why the difference.

Bloglines has another feature. You can e-mail whatever part of a particular post appears on Bloglines to someone, provided you know their e-mail address. The e-mail includes a link to the post. If you type in a message, that will be e-mailed, also. I've had a student e-mail me a couple of things in this way. If you want to, you can e-mail to yourself.

Blogging is a way to provide such feeds simply. Say you want to keep an on-line diary of your progress with a new house, so that others can check into how it's going at their leisure. Get a blog page from Blogger, or some other blog host. (Blogger is free) Each day, or each hour, or whenever you want to, you can type in "Interviewed builder today--pray!" or whatever. Such an entry is called a post, or posting. You can e-mail family members the web address of your blog, and tell them to subscribe, through Bloglines, or in some other way (or they can bookmark the page and go back to it whenever they want to). Then, you don't have to e-mail them again. They just check your blog whenever they choose to. The latest post will be at the top of your blog, with others below, in reverse chronological order, and also a list of postings at the side. This list is links to the postings. Each post is automatically given its own URL--you don't have to do it. You do have to give each post a title.

Blogger allows you to create and save drafts. That way, you can do several posts at once, then publish one of them each day, by just changing the time and date, and then hitting the Publish button in Blogger.

I recommend that after you post, you View in a New Window. That way, if you spot something that you need to clean up, you can switch back the first window and fix it right away.

You can edit and re-post a post, if you see something that should be fixed. It won't destroy the comments, and it won't even change the time when Blogger says it was posted, unless you change than when you edit. Changing dates without telling anyone is not good form, if you think someone might be using your posts for academic purposes, but, otherwise, it probably doesn't matter. You can re-post the same post, changing just the date. I did that. I don't think anyone but God and me read my posts, or could have, until Bloglines started indexing them, so I re-posted a few of them after indexing started.

You can create more than one blog, using the same account, with Blogger, if you need to. (One for each class, or for each grandkid?)

If you use Blogger, you should subscribe to the Blogger Status feed. It alerts you to problems, or times when Blogger won't be available, due to maintenance, and to fixes.

CNet recommends TypePad as a little easier than Blogger. I haven't had trouble with Blogger, and TypePad costs $4.95 a month, whereas Blogger is free. WheatBlog is an open source application for hosting blogs.

To save yourself typing scripture into a post, the Blue Letter Bible and the Bible Gateway have several versions available, which you can copy and paste. At least the ASV and the KJV are public domain.

Bloglines has a blogging facility, but it is quite limited. I tried it for a while, but gave up, and took the plunge to Blogger, and I'm glad I did. The main problem is that no links are allowed. Most posts have links, if only to other posts by the same author, and, generally, the more links you have, the more useful your post is. One advantage of Blogger is that it is owned by Google, and a Blogger blog has a Google search box that lets you search within the blog (a few ads may show up, too, but you can ignore those.) After your first 100 posts or so, this feature will be useful to you, so you can find what you did.

Most blogs are by a single author, but Blogger allows multi-author blogging. See here for instructions. You could, of course, just both use the same password, etc., and no one would know who wrote what, but the instructions make provision for two separate log-ins.

How do you get anyone to read your blog? Well, you can't make anyone, short of bribery, or maybe giving extra credit. However, there are some ways to persuade:

• add your blog's URL to your e-mail signature
• put a link to your blog on your home page
• comment on other blogs. This is the best method, in my limited experience. A few other people will want to know who said this. Be sure your blog's URL is included in the comment. Usually, there's a spot for it in the dialog box.
• do something that someone will find with a search.
• submit your blog for indexing. This link lists 55 indexing services--Bloglines isn't the only one. Some of them let you submit your blog for indexing.
• join the Christian Carnival. There's one every week (this is the one for April 13th) inviting bloggers to send the URL of a post from that week, a summary of that post, your name, your main blog address, and your e-mail address. The person in charge of the Carnival lists the submissions, with brief descriptions and links. Subscribe to a search for Christian Carnival, or you can be put on the mailing list for announcements.

Most blogs allow comments on the posts. Usually, there is a dialog box that has you put in your name (you can use a pseudonym--I exchanged comments with an Ish for a month or so before I knew which sex Ish was) your e-mail address, and your URL. Put your blog URL in that spot. What usually happens is if someone reads the comment, and is interested, they click on your name, and are taken to your blog. Depending on the host, commenting on most blogs doesn't give away your e-mail address. Blogger doesn't, anyway. Occasionally, people have commented on one of my posts, and usually, I get an e-mail with the comment, but I can't reply to it, because the actual e-mail address of the commenter isn't given. (I can comment on the comment after my own post, which is a common way of responding to a comment.) A couple of former students have put their e-mail address in, on purpose, I hope. I have responded.

I would recommend that you subscribe to yourself. That way you can find your own blog quickly directly from Bloglines, if, for example, you want to check out a comment. You can also see how many, if any, readers have subscribed to your blog that way, if you are interested in that sort of thing. Don't forget that there are other ways to subscribe, and some people may read your blog by just using a favorite/bookmark.

You can post to a Blogger blog via e-mail. Here is one set of instructions. (I've not done this.)

You can post pictures to a Blogger blog, but you can't just paste them in. They have to be located elsewhere in cyberspace. I recommend doing so through Flickr, a free on-line photo-sharing site. (Here's a recent article about Flickr) You will have to establish a login and password. When you have uploaded a photo that you want to show up as part of a blog post, you go to Flickr. Select one of your pictures. Click on the "View Different Sizes" command. Select a size. The necessary HTML will show in a box. You can copy it with Control-C, and paste it into the HTML option of editing a draft in your Blogger blog, using Control-V. If you already have pictures on the web, you can add them to your blog by putting the URL of the picture file (including the .jpg or .gif, or whatever it is) in Blogger. The advantage of Flickr is that storing pictures there won't count toward your web space limits, if you have any. Flickr has a 10 Mb limit per month. Flickr has at least one drawback, namely that it converts all graphic files into .JPG format, including animated .GIFs.

You can use a similar procedure for adding a picture to your Blogger profile, rather than to a post. The URL goes in the Photo URL spot in the dialog box.

There's always the question of what to say. Of course, it depends on your audience. One thing you can "say" in a blog post isn't "saying" at all. You can link to other Internet items in a blog post. (In Blogger, select the URL of whatever it is you want to link to, then use the chain-link icon, and paste the entire URL in. Erase the initial http:// from the dialog box before you paste in the URL, because, if you have the entire URL selected, it will include that part of the URL.)

As Joe Carter puts it, there are Blog thinkers and Blog linkers. He gives helpful advice on linking in this post, and says:

Though undervalued, linkers are even more essential to the health of the blogosphere than are thinkers. After all, the world is inundated with provocative ideas and punditry. But finding one’s way within the information avalanche requires what Hugh Hewitt calls “cyber-sherpas.” Talented linkers, however, do more than merely guide their readers to this information. They provide the value-added services of sifting through dozens or even hundred of blog posts, news updates, and magazine articles and sharing the handful that are worthy of attention.

If you have something really good, but a little long, make more than one post out of it. After the first 3 or 4 sentences, you will have probably lost some of your audience, anyway. Many of us out there are more likely to read a short post than a long one.

Write about what interests you the most. Most likely, someone else, sooner or later, will find it interesting, too. If not, you are still pursuing your own interest, and that's probably the main thing.

See the "How To Start a Blog" post in the references section.

Warnings:

1) Be careful--don't post personal information about people without their consent. Even photos, unless taken in a public place such as at a wedding or football game, shouldn't be posted without the consent of the subjects.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Legal Guide for Bloggers.

2) Make backups of your files. I suggest copying all of your posts from your blog each month, and saving them as a single file. I also suggest saving a copy of each post as you make it, if possible, at least until making a larger backup. You can copy a post from Blogger by selecting, then hitting Control-C, then going to Word or FrontPage, and hitting Control-V.

References:
Blog basics: Learn how to keep an online journal

The “How To Start a Blog” Series: Tips and Suggestions for Launching a Successful Blog, a post with links to a series by Joe Carter, of the evangelical outpost.

"How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)" deals with privacy concerns, and issues of blogging at, or about, work.

"FAQ: Blogging on the Job," from CNet.

Wonders of the Web - Blogging from Ken Leebow's Blogging About Incredible Blogs, is the outline of a presentation, apparently to small business owners, on blogging. It is full of important links, and suggests ideas related to blogging.

Blogging Tutorial. Begins with "What is a Blog?"

RSS: What it is, Where to get it, How to make it, How to use it, A general page on RSS, with links to explanations, technical assistance, indexes, and other important items.

Blogger unofficial FAQ blog has answers (some pretty technical) to many questions about Blogger blogging. Weblogs Compendium is perhaps the best all-around resource for bloggers.

Blogger Help document page on Promoting your Blog

WebReference has a page with links to resources (some technical) on RSS feeds.

The Educational Blogger's Network is a web page, mostly on blogging in the public schools, leading to several other pages, including blogs to note, and tools you can use in blogging. There are a half-dozen RSS feeds. I'm not clear as to whether you can subscribe to more than one of these, or how to distinguish between them.

Adding a Blogroll

I haven't had a Blogroll as part of my blog until the afternoon of April 11th, so I'm even less of an expert on that than on the rest of this. That's why it's at the bottom of this document.

The method I used works, but is not for the person who gets the screaming heeby jeebies at the sight of HTML. There are other methods, but I haven't used them.

I signed up with Blogrolling, another free service. Once you sign up, and activate your account, you can enter blogs that you want listed in your roll. It's straightforward, but fairly tedious--you have to enter each name and each URL that you want. Don't worry about alphabetizing, as Blogrolling will take care of that for you. There are other methods of doing this, I'm sure, including writing the code yourself. Blogrolling generates the code listing the blogs you want to list, giving it an identifier, so that Blogger can retrieve the list from Blogrolling. (It also mentions itself on your blog.)

When you come to a stopping point (I am assuming that you can go back and add more blogs, or delete some), generate the code. Copy it. I suggest that you copy it into a text file, in case you need it, or your browser hiccups, or something, before you copy the code into your template.

Go to Blogger, and go to settings. Go to Template. You should see the beginning of the code for your template, specifying the colors, etc. You should put the code after the <MainOrArchivePage> code. To get a header that says "Blogroll," I also copied a previous sidebar header, in this case  <h2 class="sidebar-title">Archives</h2>, changing the word, "Archives" to Blogroll. I stuck a <p> before the <h2 class="sidebar-title">Blogroll</h2> code, to add a paragraph.

You should be able to write the code for a Blogroll directly, in HTML. That's one of my to-do projects.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The purpose of this is NOT to prevent use by others, but to prevent other users from restricting free use. I claim no ownership of text above which is quoted from other sources, or of the images used.

Martin LaBar, June 27th, 2005 (My blog is here.)