Blogging Lessons 101

Blogging Challenges and Some Surprises!

Finally, I decided to create a blog that I would uphold, preserve and look-after.
I took several attempts to blog before but it's only recently that I decided I want to be a serious blogger.

And so, I got ahead and started reading helpful articles available online for some basic tips and guidelines on what to do.

I have some basic technical knowledge on how to start my computer and browse the net, but doing my own customized blog header would require a little couple of hours (the whole day!) of facing the computer, experimenting things and swearing a little bit when realizing I haven't saved a backup.

But even before my struggles in coming up with my very own header, it was very interesting to note the time I spent (which is nearly five hours) just searching for my own blogger URL.

I never really expected it was really hard to get one!

Getting My URL! Yaiks!

I already have a previous blog in Blogger (which I rarely update) so starting my account wasn't that bad, but creating another blog was another story.

Of course there was a box that looks something like:

And so, i typed the very first thing that came to mind, "everydaylife." I want my url to look like everydaylife.blogspot.com, which is very easy to remember and pretty much sums up how I want this blog to be. Well, of course, it said "Sorry, this blog address is not available."

I typed another keyword, this time it's "downtoearth", I kinda like the idea of my blogspot being modest and unpretentious so I really want my URL to be "downtoearth". Well, too bad, this too was already taken.

So I went ahead and continued on my search. I tried "fatamorgana" but still, to no avail. I started to get curious. I searched each url and tried to see what posts or contents these blogs have. I was shocked.

The first three blogs have next to nothing. They are almost blank. I checked some of the posts and the most recent was dated last 2006. I was really sad. I really want their URLs. (sob.)

So I looked around my room to get more inspiration and proceeded typing in thinkingmind and moderncinderella, (yeah I know, I'm already desperate this time) which I typed with fingers crossed but of course, they were also already taken.

But what got me a little more curious was that when I typed these other keywords and searched on these blogs... well, guess what, just like the other blogs I've visited, they pretty much look the same, and moderncinderella just shows a blank white space just like everydaylife.

I really hope Blogger/Blogspot could really do something about freeing URLs once they're not updated for let's say 6 months or a year, right? Especially if it has little to no contents.

Or maybe they're saving these URLs under their wing? These URLs are really simple and catchy and I'm sure many bloggers would want keywords like these as much as I do. Specially now that the internet becomes more and more "niche focused" and targeted.

Well after a couple more attempts, like typing in "whoosh," "oops," "pieceofcake" and "ohno" which are obviously taken, it made more curious about the blogger because he/she thought about interesting and funny url titles which I only thought of today, well maybe except for "ohno" which has this funny description "Hello there. I don't know what I'm doing".

So, after five hours, I finally found some free urls which made me a little fickle minded on which of them I'd have to use. Before I will eat up another 5 hours just for choosing a URL address, I decided I have to pick from these 3 which I randomly typed in the URL box out of desperation.

onelonelyumbrella
earthdownunder
womanoftheearth

Whoala, they are available and ok so I picked womanoftheearth.blogspot.com... yep that's me. Yey me.

I spent another 5 hours customizing my template which hardly made any difference. But after trying out a couple of things, I found out that Blogger has this new way of customizing your blog and it made my life less miserable, thank you.

You can watch a tutorial on this new Blogger Feature here.

This new Blogger feature enables you to add a picture to your header which of course what I did for this blog. Cool right?

Well, so far, I feel pretty good about my achievement today. Yaiks.