Getting to Know the Settings in Blogger / Tech Help For Bloggers Series

Welcome to the fourth installment of the Tech Help for Bloggers Series. This series is focused on providing technical tips and advice to help you understand and get the most out of your blogging experience. Here is the UPDATED schedule of posts (based on your suggestions):

• July 1       Getting Started / Intro to HTML
• July 4       Sprucing Up Your Site Part 1 / Blog and social media buttons
• July 8       Sprucing Up Your Site Part 2 / Creating pages and navigation bars
• July 15     Getting to Know the Settings in Blogger / Your blog, behind the scenes
• July 22     Layouts and Templates in Blogger / How to change your blog's look
• July 26     CSS and Web Fonts / How to use custom fonts for your blog
• July 29     Organizing Events / Creating forms, polls, and sharable documents
• Aug 1       Hosting A Linky Party / Guest Post w/ Laura of TGIFF! and Quokka Quilts
• Aug 5       Pinterest and Flickr / Features for managing image sharing
• Aug 12     Giveaways / Technical tips and tricks for hosting a successful giveaway

Today we are looking more closely at the Settings menus in Blogger. 

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I wanted to take the time today to talk about the multitude of setting options that are available in Blogger. I also wanted to quickly clarify that I don't necessarily endorse Blogger as the best platform for everyone, but since I'm the most familiar with it, I thought I would share a few tips that I have found useful in managing my blog settings. 

You can find your "Settings" menu within your Design menus. There are a number of submenus within Settings that contain a lot of useful tools to help manage your blog. Under the "Basic" submenu you will find settings that allow you to title your blog, provide a description, and set your basic privacy settings--including who can search for and read your blog (in case you were writing a personal journal v.s. a public blog). 

There are also two very important settings that you will find here dictating the Blog Address that your blog will publish to--either your given blogger address or a custom domain that you can purchase and host yourself--and the Permissions settings that allow you to add additional Blog Authors (say if you were organizing a series and wanted to allow others to publish on your blog). 

The next submenu, "Posts and Comments", contains setting for just that. You can dictate how many posts show on your main page, any pre-formatted text or code that will appear each time you create a new post (I will talk more about this later), and if you would like to have your images appear in the Lightbox setting. There are also settings that control who can comment on your posts and how. 

One very important setting to note here is "Word Verification". You can either turn it on or off for comments. Personally, I like to keep mine turned off, because it can present a barrier to leaving comments for your readers. I have never had issues with spam, so I think it's useful to keep mine turned off for now.

The third submenu contains settings for mobile posting via your cellphone (SMS/MMS) or via e-mail. It's also where you can change your comment notification e-mail, in case you decide to change (or delete) your current e-mail address in the future and would like to add a different one.

The last submenu I wanted to discuss is the "Other" menu. This is sort of a catch-all containing  settings for your Site Feed--for example, if you would like your entire blog post or just a sample to post to your RSS feed--as well as tools to allow you to connect your blog to Google Analytics (highly recommended instead of using just Blogger Stats). 

Within this menu there is also a tool that allows you to import, export, or even delete your blog. This tool is also very useful for backing up the content of your blog. In previous posts, I discussed how to back-up your template, but in order to back-up your content, you must use the export tool to download a copy of your blog to your desktop. I also recommend doing this step regularly, perhaps each time you back-up your template.

For more information about the settings in Blogger and other helpful topics about the platform, feel free to stop by and browse Google's help topics.