A Note on the Blogging Process

While I have experienced blogging before in a collaboration setting for my ENG-E 304 (Literatures 1900-Present) class that I took at IU last fall, this is the first time that I have actually set up my own blog. In my class, we used Blogger to post personal comments and questions that we had about the novels we were reading. My professor set up the blog, and all I had to do was post on it once a week. Now that I have been through the process of setting up my own blog, I really appreciate the work my professor went through to get our class blog up and running. While creating the blog itself wasn't challenging, my perfectionist tendencies really made the customization options into something of a nightmare. I am still a little angry about the fact that there seems to be no way for me to change the font color of my title at the top of the blog, nor does there seem to be any way for me to move it further to the left. I wish to do this so that the white font won't get swallowed by the light spots in my background rock climbing picture. The title was a lot bigger originally, and I wish that there was some way I could fix it, but I have come to the conclusion that the whole problem originated with my decision to use a pre-programmed template, and unless I learn html coding, I don't think that it is going to change. Being a perfectionist has other downsides as well. It's hard for me to do anything to my blog without having to check how it looks on the real thing multiple times. To do even one small thing, I'll find myself going through a process that looks something like this: I'll make a change, view the change, edit the change, view the change, keep the change, discard the change, make a new change, and so on and so on. This process is quite time consuming, so I hope that I'll get more proficient and less nitpicky with time and experience. So, for now at least, I'll just have to put my perfectionist-self aside and deal with the imperfections on my blog.

Despite the problems I've encountered, I still absolutely LOVE the features that Blogger offers its users. I was able to create my own quiz, which can now be viewed on the sidebar. I think that the quiz gadget is an amazing feature, and I plan to change it weekly, so be sure to check back! The other gadgets that you can add to your blog are really superb. I added a picture and plan to utilize some of the other gadgets, like the slideshow, quotation, and picture of the day gadgets. You can even add game gadgets! I've gone gadget CRAZY!!! I would definitely recommend Blogger to anyone, because it is user friendly and fun!