Annotation for Blog Excercise

After being a pretty frequent reader of blogs in the past few years, I decided that I would use this exercise to make my own blog. Blogging is something that is done frequently at the library where I work, but I had never tried it for myself. It seemed like it would be very complicated, but I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t.
I decided to use Blogger to create my blog because I have seen this website used by other people and it looked fairly user friendly and produces good, easy to read results. The fist part of the blog-making process was simple enough. Blogger asked me to sign up and create an account. They asked questions about how I wanted the blog to read, such as what name I wanted to appear, what did I want the title to be, and what html name I wanted to use. (If anyone is wondering about my html name, it represents places that are important to me: bulls from Spain, buffaloes from Colorado, and lobsters from Maine.) I was then asked to pick out a template, and was ready to start blogging.
Before starting my blog, I wanted to personalize it a little bit. I liked how you could add features to the side bar. I filled in some “about me” information, put up a picture, and some links. I wanted to put a link to an RSS feed for my blog in this section, which I didn’t really know how to do. I remember Professor Ballard mentioning Feedburner as a way to create an RSS feed. Once I went to the Feedburner website, all I had to do was follow the steps laid out and it gave me the link, which I then put in my blog. Not so hard after all. I then wanted to add the slideshow feature, but sort of had a hard time with it. I wanted to put in my own photos, but none of the photo hosting sites that I use work. I think that if I made a flickr or picassa account it would work, so maybe I’ll try that later. I settled on pictures (it seems like mostly paintings) from Photobucket of where I lived in Maine. I also wanted to put some more info in my profile including an audio clip.
For my first big post I wanted to do something about me with photos. I wrote about the places that I’ve lived and included photos of each. This was the most time consuming part, formatting where I wanted the pictures to go. While it was a little slow-going and sort of tedious, it wasn’t really that hard, and I was pleased with the results. I also played around with font and made a different color for each section. In addition I wanted to include some more links, so I added a link to the Wikipedia article for each place that I mentioned. I was hoping to make the link titles better, but kept losing the link when I tried typing more.
The final thing that I did, and probably the most frustrating, was adding video. I had a great movie that I made of pictures and video clips from my time in Maine that I had already made, and I wanted to put that up. When I tried to upload it, however, the file was way too big and it didn’t work. So I made a smaller version, but still struggled to get it up on the blog. It took a lot longer than I expected to upload and process and I wasn’t sure it was going to work, but it did!I am really excited that I have gotten this far in making a blog. Hopefully, I can continue to figure out some more cool stuff and make it even better.