Witty and pertinent observations on matters of great significance
OR
Incoherent jottings on total irrelevancies
OR
Something else altogether
OR
All of the aboveThe Day The Music Was Born
Gosh, the beginning of an era. After the best part of a year of prolific commenting on other people's blogs, I've finally succumbed and started one of my own.
It feels like the birth of Radio One. I feel as though I should be playing "Flowers In The Rain" by The Move.
I'm just sitting doing crosswords in the bog
Watching the power of my blog
Making my inbox grow....
A-nyway.... it's all Clare's fault. There I was, happily commenting away on her blog, when she asks me to mind it while she goes off up a mountainside for a week's writing retreat, creating the sequel to (The Dying Of Delight).
Then she goes and edits my posts to make them all html-y and point-and-click and generally makes me feel like a fifty-year-old Luddite. Huh. We seasoned IT professionals know all about code re-use (i.e. lift Clare's html, see how it works, adapt and adopt).
So be gentle with me guys. I'm newly moved in here, still tripping over cyberspatial boxes, wondering how to create a blogroll and where it will appear. (Which is why I haven't got one yet. Be patient.) I'll probably leave some default setting turned on for the first few months and be the blogging equivalent of the guy walking round with the cleaner's label still attached to the back of his jacket.
OK, a few last minute checks and then I'll turn this thing on so at least it shows up in Blogger.
It feels like the birth of Radio One. I feel as though I should be playing "Flowers In The Rain" by The Move.
I'm just sitting doing crosswords in the bog
Watching the power of my blog
Making my inbox grow....
A-nyway.... it's all Clare's fault. There I was, happily commenting away on her blog, when she asks me to mind it while she goes off up a mountainside for a week's writing retreat, creating the sequel to (The Dying Of Delight).
Then she goes and edits my posts to make them all html-y and point-and-click and generally makes me feel like a fifty-year-old Luddite. Huh. We seasoned IT professionals know all about code re-use (i.e. lift Clare's html, see how it works, adapt and adopt).
So be gentle with me guys. I'm newly moved in here, still tripping over cyberspatial boxes, wondering how to create a blogroll and where it will appear. (Which is why I haven't got one yet. Be patient.) I'll probably leave some default setting turned on for the first few months and be the blogging equivalent of the guy walking round with the cleaner's label still attached to the back of his jacket.
OK, a few last minute checks and then I'll turn this thing on so at least it shows up in Blogger.
posted by Rob @ 00:06
4 Comments:
Oooh, hello!
Looking nice already. Love the title.
Re: HTML. You don't need to know it if you don't want (although I'm guessing as a software engineer you will also be an inveterate tinkerer and therefore unable to resist).
By default, Blogger shows you raw html when you're composing blog posts. But there is another way. There's a tab called "Compose" just above the place where you enter the text for your blog posts. Click on this. Now use all the little tool buttons at the top to do links, coloured text, italic, bold, insert pictures, etc. If you hover your mouse over each button, it'll tell you what it does.
But I'm sure I emailed you about some of this already... or in other words, RTFM. ;o)
As for blogrolls, you could do what I do and edit your template (Click on Settings in Blogger, then click on the template tab. Do NOT attempt to edit it in the Blogger window. Copy and paste it into a text editor, and always save a copy of how it was before you edited it). I just looked at it, deconstructed, tinkered, trial and error.
But you don't have to do any of that. You could just use a free third-party tool like Blogrolling. I think they live at www.blogrolling.com, but otherwise have a look at Gaekwad's blog - he uses blogrolling and there is a link to them somewhere or other.
Most blogging tasks can be accomplished by using some whizzy free tool or other and an absolute minimum of, if not no, HTML knowledge.
Still, if you fancy it, here are some basic tags to get you started. Most html involves an opening tag and a closing tag. The opening tag looks like this:
[TAG] and the closing tag like this: [/TAG]
Replace square brackets with angled, i.e. < and >.
The "TAG" bit is replaced with the unique tag identifier, often a single letter, but not always. The closing tag is identical to the opener, apart from an additional forward slash. The text the tag applies to is enclosed between the opener and the closer.
The identifier for bold is "b" (not including the quotes).
Italic = "i"
Strikethrough = "strike"
Underline = "u"
Can't think of any more at the moment...
Thanks Clare. As you say, I'm an inveterate tinkerer, but let's get the show up and blogging first, eh?
I'll check my email from you about Blogger details. As you say, RTFM.
Hmm... that could be another "Type is s Four-Letter Word" submission...
Glad you liked the title. Actually I'd pretty much decided to start a blog even before using BP as a dry-run, but one of the things holding me up was the lack of a good title. After all, one can change most things about a blog without too much hassle, but a title is sort of committing. What happened was, last night I was ordering some sheet music and wondering about getting a (non-humorous) piece by Peter Schickele, so was browsing on his website when I spotted the title. I knew it already (I have it on CD) and it suddenly struck me as a great blog name. The rest (unlike poverty) is history.
Definitely a great title. And I would recommend that you do get to grips with HTML (it tends to mean your pages have a cleaner design and source-code but that could just be another geek-girl talking: hello Clare!)
Best of wishes.
Haha yes, titles. When I named Boob Pencil it was before I had encountered most of the rest of the blogosphere and I had no idea that titles were (a) important, and (b) pretty immutable. I'm glad of that, otherwise I would have agonised over it, instead of looking at the piicy I'd already chosen for a background and thinking 'that'll do'. It was called Pencil Boob for the first twenty-four hours, but it was very nearly just called "Clare's Blog".
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