Blogger.com Help – Lesson 8 – Basic Settings

The basic settings tab provides you a certain amount of control over your blog. While you may not have full control, there are enough mechanisms put in place to allow you to do everything you might want to. We are going to start by taking a look at each of the setting pages provided to us on the Blogger.com blog system.

Note to new visitors! If you would like to know more about this series or view all available lessons, just follow the appropriate link.

The basic settings tab provides some high level settings that you can use to customize certain elements of your blog. Things such as the title and description and most other things that you probably set one and then forget about. I know I did.

Most of the settings are pretty simple to understand, and there is also help associated with each item on the page itself. I’ll try to elaborate a little more on each for you.

The Basic Settings Tab

Here is a list of the items found on this page, and an explanation of what each setting is modifying.

• Title – Most everything gets a title in one form or another, your blog is no different. By now you probably already know all about the title tag and where it shows up. Normally, the value you put in will be found in the header of you blog.
• Description – I added a description that reads ‘To lighten your day and inspire’ and you can see that on my blog. You get 500 characters to describe the blog however you might want to, which may be plenty or not, depending upon your needs and any restrictions you might have with your template.

A few thoughts on the title and description: they are pretty standard on most blogs. They are pretty self-evident of their purpose and function for a blog. They are normally the first text that any search engine will see on your site, and will also be used for displaying information about your site as part of the link to your site. The image below shows the Do You Live Cautiously post when it comes up in search engine results, Google in particular.

You can see that my blog title shows in the results as the first text. The title of you site, if you are trying to promote a certain product or service, would do well to use the title tag with this in mind and try out some specific keywords to help define your site for your visitors and/or customers.

Because I only now changed my description from nothing to something, we’ll check back on the results to see how they are affected by the new description. Just to note, I came up number one for ‘views on life do you live cautiously’, which shouldn’t be terribly surprising given the specificity of the keywords used, but it’s still nice to see a post you wrote pop up number one for anything.

Moving on down the line…

• Add your blog to our listings – Like any good blog system, they promote the blogs that you create by spreading them around in various other listings. This setting also controls if your blog will be a potential candidate for the ‘Next Blog’ button that shows in the topmost bar across you blog. You also have the ability to edit the blogs that are displayed by clicking the convenient link they gave you. I have this set for ‘Yes’, I want my site to be found by as many people as possible, so include it in your listings Blogger.com, please.
• Let search engines find your blog – I have this also set to ‘Yes’. If I had this set to ‘No’, I should not be able to find any results in Google. This doesn’t mean they disappear from Google when you change it. Rather, the next time the bots from Google come to crawl your site (Whoda thunk I would have ever said that in this lifetime and actually meant it…), the next time they come, they will bypass your site. If you need to remove specific pages from Google, you can do so through the Webmaster Tools on Google.
• Show Quick Editing on your Blog – When this is set to ‘Yes’ and you are logged in to the Blogger.com system, you will see a little yellow pencil near the base of each post (for most templates, some templates may place this element near the title of the post). Just look around for it on your homepage, you’re bound to find it.
• Show Email Post Links – Like the Show Quick Editing option, this toggles the display of a little email icon alongside your post. The icon is a link that will take your users to a page that allows them to email your post to up to 10 people. Nice option, and of course completely subjective to the whims of what you fancy your blog should be like.
• Adult Content – It’s completely up to you what you post on Blogger.com, although I’m sure there are some limits. Either way, you can use this to throw up a Content Warning message that looks like this.
  

Global Settings

The two settings found under the global settings will effect all blogs you may be operating. If you are operating blogs under different user names, this only affects the user you are currently logged in as.

• Show Compose mode for all your blogs – This will change the way your edit posts screen works. You will no longer have the two tabs for switching between HTML and Compose mode. If you don’t know what that means, simply switch it and go edit a post to see the difference.
• Enable Transliteration – Transliteration is a big word to say, Blogger will translate your text as best it can to make it understandable in another language. If someone really wants to know more about this, I’ll be happy to work up a post on it. For now however, I believe there are only 5 languages (Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu). These type of conversion routines are never perfect. If anyone is interested in knowing more about this feature, just give a holler!

Finally, at the end of the admin page is our Save button. Ironically enough, and bad design if you ask me, there is also a button to delete your blog. The one thing that makes this ok is the fact that you will be prompted again to ensure you really want to delete your blog should you click the delete button.

Enjoy making your changes if you need to!

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