Too Clever By Half

A CRITICAL APPRAISAL

Creative Commons attribution below

Even the very oldest Blogger themes (also called "templates") still work, in that they faithfully render their contents on the World Wide Web.

Beyond that, any of the three families of themes from the past decade are broadly  functional. Each family has advantages and drawbacks not offered by the others.

So, a reasonable question is, what theme should I use today? 

Need a web address for your new blog?

Blogger gives you a free subdomain on the blogspot.com domain.

You can have any subdomain you like as long as it

• is available
• consists only of legal characters
• does not begin or end with a hyphen or underscore

For Blogger, legal characters are letters and numbers, and also hyphens when inside the subdomain name (not at the very beginning or end).

You never really know what you think until someone shoves a video camera in your face and says, Quick! What's your number one blogging tip?

This happened to me recently at a conference about Google products. I was randomly ambushed by a team collecting advice about all of these (not just Blogger, but YouTube, Search, etc.).

As the camera rolled my blogging life flashed before my eyes. Many tips, but which which is primary?

Think fast! (Wikimedia photo/Creative Commons license 2.0)

Labels? Feeds? SEO? Best fonts? Facebook integration? Google+?

Do not fuss over finding the perfect blogger web address. Chances are, it is taken.

Get over it and start blogging.

You can still title your blog whatever you want. Your name and your blogger url don't have to match.

When I renamed this blog, I discovered that toocleverbyhalf.blogspot.com was taken. Same for 2cleverbyhalf, cleverbyhalf, tooclever, and 2clever.

To add insult to injury, most of those blogs were blank—or nonexistent!

I just kept going until I found something free. Total time elapsed: five minutes.

Just starting out?

I think it is a good practice to start your blog as private while you test things, experiment, and grapple with the subject matter of your blog.

You will feel freer to try new things and make changes, both to content and design, if you know you are the only reader.