Set the table for blogging

Photo: Hopefulromntic21 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

At the end of the setup process for a new blog, you'll find yourself at your blog's dashboard: the private back end of the blog where you can write, edit, format, and run your blog.

To get your blog started, you can click the New Post button at top right on your dashboard.

It's not a bad idea to try this out. You can always edit or delete a practice post later.

But one dashboard section that deserves your early attention is the Settings page, full of controls and options. 

Google has ➧ an excellent guide to these controls, concise and well organized. You can use that to configure your blog further.

Here, I want to highlight a few things of particular interest as you get started.

In this guide for newcomers, the ➧ symbol indicates my personal recommendations for success.

Draw the curtain

I recommend ➧ making your blog completely private to start out. With the privacy settings active, you'll be free to experiment while you learn the ropes. 

Then you can get a few blog posts on your blog, and refine your theme and layout, before you debut by switching those settings back to public.

In particular, I would make the following changes

Permissions > Reader access > Private to authors. Result: only you will be able to view the blog.

Privacy > Visible to search engines > off. Result: search engines won't index your blog.

Change them back when you are ready to show the world.

Other useful settings

Basic > Description: A short tagline ➧ can complement your title and make your blog more friendly to new readers. Example: "Blogger hints, hacks, and attitude."

Meta tags: Search engines often (though not always) display the description meta tag. Mine is the same as the Description above, but you can write a search-page-specific version if that makes sense to you.

There are other settings you should review, some straightforward and some inscrutable. Here are some I would not touch.

Hands off

➧ Do not mess with any settings under Crawlers and Indexing unless you have highly specialized purposes and really know what you are doing. They are optimized for Blogger by default.

I have never changed these.

Another thing you can safely leave alone is Site Feed > Post feed redirect URL. The use case for this has never been clear to me, and it is weaker now that Google has yanked key functionality from Feedburner.

Under Email, ➧ keep Post using email turned off, unless you really want to use this feature. It is a potential security hole. (The other options in that section, though, do not introduce similar risks.)

There are many beneficial things that you can do in Settings, and it's worth your time (at some point) to learn about all of them.

But this will do for starters.

Links

• dashboard
• indispensable settings guide
• going private
• title and tagline