First, lets talk about setup. This was a breeze and took literally seconds to setup and get ready for posting. After signing in with your account you are guided through a few short questions which specify the name of your blog, the layout chosen from select templates and the license agreement. The templates provided offer some decent selections with more choices as to color once you are logged in.
After choosing a layout, you can also edit the positioning of page elements. Any page elements can be dragged and dropped into position, which makes this aspect of blogger very easy to use. You don’t need to be a web designer to get your ducks in order. Gadgets are easy to add by clicking the add a gadget link and choosing from the decent list of applications, although getting them to fit with your chosen theme may be difficult.
Let’s talk about posting a new blog entry. This is obviously one of the most important parts of blogging. The default editor allows regular and html editing, although the regular editing is somewhat of a pain especially with images. Luckily, Blogger has added a new editor that you can enable by going to the Basic Settings and selecting the “updated editor” under the select post editor section. It also claims to have better raw html editing, and support for Safari, although I did not test this.
Another nice feature, and the last I’ll mention, is the easy integration with Adsense. This makes it incredibly easy to monetize your blog by simply filling out the registration. In the perfect world there would be no ads anywhere on the web, but in reality they are necessary and the integrations is very slick, allowing you to add it as a gadget.
Overall, Blogger seems to be a very well built and easy to use web application, which anyone with a bit of knowledge should be able to use. It’s applications like these that have made blogging and social networking such a hit. Make sure to come back for my next review on Digsby!
