Free Google Blogger blog/web site

I wrote a post on using free Google Sites to test out a Recipe site I wanted to create to collect some of my recipes and processes in one place.

As I was building the site I realised that I was going to get a long list of things and then I’d need to break them down and classify them. Also, the way I’m cooking and posting is not in any order so I thought, why not do a blog site with the recipes, information I’d found and my method of adapting them for my requirements. That way, I could write then up as they came along, then I could group them later on the Google Sites into their classification.

I’ve done this backwards in some ways, although my attitude is try something to find out what you need, reflect on it and then have another go. There was learning in the first process, even though it may have made you go backwards at first.

As I was looking at the free google docs and other tools I came across my old blogs that I’d started on Blogger back in 2015. I didn’t get far with it at the time and moved on to another platform. I think it was WordPress.com (free but limited, so ended up hosting elsewhere)

New Google Blogger Site

I decided to try out creating another free Blogger site. This is an exercise to explore another free tool as well as managing my recipes.

The blogger site can be used for posting Blogs, but you can also have static pages as well, so you could use it as an alternative to Google Sites. In fact, you have far more flexibility with this theme wise as well as gadgets for the side bars.

One thing that is nice is the site can be HTTPS at the beginning, so that is handy, and you don’t have to use LetsEncrypt to constantly update it, so far less maintenance required.

The only issue is that your web domainhas to have the  .blogspot.com/  part of the domain below

https://adgustem.blogspot.com/

Although I think, like Google Sites, you can use your own domain. I may check that out later to see if I can use the FREENOM free domains for this purpose, possibly it may be easier than  when I tried on  Google Sites.

Here is a video on basic setup of a Blogger site, there are a lot out there so just do a search in YouTube:

Themes

When you are in editing mode on your site you can review the Themes by bloggers. There are other themes, paid and free, that you can upload to the site as well.

Just choose one to start and this can be changed reasonably easily later. I like a header, but not too big, most of the standard themes have the header taking up the main page and you need to scroll down to see the content. I do find that annoying, I’m visiting the site for the content, not a pretty picture, so the quicker I can see the content the better.

You can go into the HTML code and do some editing. On your own head be it. Best to save a copy of the code before you start in case you break it.

Other Themes

I went looking for other themes and found this site.

After selecting a (free) theme to download, they have this page to show you how to upload it to your site. The first method I tried did not work so I used the Cut/Paste method with the XML file and it worked fine.

Gadgets

These are small items that enhance your site. Go to the layout tab and add gadgets (called widgets on other websites like WordPress). You can get free 3rd party gadgets. Here is an article listing some of them.

For the basic setup of a gadget, see image below:

For the Favicon there are websites that will take an image and convert them to a .ico file. Here is a link to one of them. The default setup for the favicon is the Blogger logo.

End comment

I’d forgotten about the Blogger site. It is quite versatile and flexible, far more than the Google Sites. I’d only thought of it as a blogging site, but since it has pages as well there is no reason you could not use it as a straight website either. I may need to explore this further and maybe setup my recipes on a Blogger site too. It would be a more appealing site than the Google Sites.

All you need for this is a gmail account and you get a free account to create blogger sites. I’m not sure if there is a limit to the ones you can create. You could even create one for a project to share with other people in a team.

The site is set as open, so it is public. ^You can alter that so that it has the following permissions:

• Under “Permissions,” find “Blog Readers” and click Edit.
• Select Public, Private – Only blog authors, or Private – Only these readers.

That makes this quite a versatile free tool.I’ll need to test it out further.