Academic Aesthetic Podcast 79

In today's podcast I show just how easy it is to create a new blog.

Yesterday I decided to make a new website.

Don't fret, I'm not getting rid of AcademicAesthetic.com any time soon, but I enjoy making Artist Trading Cards so much that I decided to make a site for sharing my favorite ones.

Of course I could just post them on my Flickr account, but their pesky 200 picture limit, along with their "Focus on photos, not anything else!" policy left me thinking I should pick another resource.

So once again I turned to Blogger.com. One of the neat things about Blogger is that you can have more than one blog on the same account, so after I logged in I just clicked on the little button that said "Create A Blog."

Then came the hardest part - figuring out a name for the new blog. I felt "Artist Trading Cards" was self explanatory enough, but wouldn't you know it, someone had already registered a blogger blog as artisttradingcards.blogspot.com. After playing around with a few other names I registered artistcards.blogspot.com and I was ready to go!

Sorta.

You see, there's nothing wrong with the default templates for Blogger - I recommend them, in fact, but I wanted something a little different. I also didn't want to spend as much time customizing this new blog as I did my Academic Aesthetic one. For the solution, I turned to Google.

A quick search using the words "Blogger templates" found a site conveniently titled Blogger templates. They didn't have millions of looks to choose from, but they had one I liked and that was enough. I copied the code and went to my new blog's settings page. A quick click on the "Template" tab later I was pasting the new code in, and after clicking on the big button that said "Republish," my blog had a brand new look.

Now granted, I did a little more after that: I tweaked the RSS feed using Feedburner, added a web counter to see how many visitors I get, and slapped a Creative Commons license on the whole thing. I also changed the default links listed in the sidebar to ones in which I was more interested, but that's content for another podcast.

The moral of this story is that if you're holding back on blogging because you think it's too hard, don't. I may do a little more modifications to my site than the average person, but the majority of my work yesterday was nothing more than copying and pasting. If you can use Microsoft Word, you have more than enough skill to fool around with Blogger.

Oh, and if you're interested in that new blog I made, I intend to post a new Artist Trading Card every weekday. I've already got a month's worth ready for posting, so I don't need to worry about running out of content any time soon.