Creating your own Blog

A blog is a good idea if you want a place to share your ideas, photos, and whatever else.

There are loads of places to host a free blog, but two of the most popular seem to be Blogger (which I use) and WordPress (If you choose wordpress, be sure and go to wordpress.com, and not .org, it’s the one you have to pay!)

Once you have picked a host it is pretty straightforward from there. You chose a name for your blog – e.g. mine is ohsocouture.blogspot.com. Be sure it is a name you like and are going to stick with, because you can’t change it afterwards!

You then pick a layout or theme you wish to use – you don’t have to worry too much about this because you can change it afterwards.
My theme is Minima. I chose this because I liked the simple white background, and was planning to add my own banner.

I wanted to have 3 columns in my blog, but blogger only gave the option of 2, so I visited this helpful site which gave me step by step instructions on how to change it.



Banner

I used GIMP to create my banner, which is great because it is free.

I found some good brushes on deviantart...

And browsed dafont for the font I wanted to use in my banner, then just worked away until I had created something I liked.

Once I had it created, I went to blogger – layout - page elements, and chose the option to insert my own header instead of a title - so far so good!



You can edit your font colour and size in edit layout - fonts and colours.

Adding photos


When I was adding the photos I had taken in second life, I wanted the background of them to be white to tie it in with the theme and make it look less like a photograph. I didn’t want to spent lots of money on a photo studio, so I went to xstreet and found this one for L$1, complete with 140 poses. So now all I have to do when editing a picture after taking it is give it a quick trim in GIMP or Picknik, and that’s it!
 To load the picture into your blog, you just go to edit posts, and in the toolbar next to link, there is a tiny picture. You simply click on it and then load your own. :)