GSAC Blogging and Web Design: GSAC - Blogging and Web Design

Review:

Settings > Comments
OpenID - OpenID is growing quickly and becoming more popular as large organizations like AOL, Facebook, France Telecom, Google, LiveDoor, Microsoft, Mixi, MySpace, Novell, Sun, Telecom Italia, Yahoo!, etc. begin to accept and/or provide OpenIDs. Today, it is estimated that there are over one billion OpenID enabled user accounts with over 40,000 websites supporting OpenID for sign in.
Backlinks - Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Now Alice's post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular comments on a post.
Comment Moderation - Always / email too!
Word Verification - stops robots
Show Profile Images

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=55373
If you have a preexisting site: create a CNAME record for your site to point to ghs.google.com (don't do this if you buy the domain through Blogger). - see: http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=58317
Enter your domain in the 'Custom Domain' option on the Settings | Publishing tab.
Buying a domain name from Blogger: Buy

Transitioning from xxx.blogger.com to blog.xxx.com:

http://wesleying.org/ - began as a Blogger account (wesleying.blogspot.com) and then bought a domain and moved over
they use WordPress rather than Blogger software: http://wesleying.org/wordpress/wp-login.php?action=register
WordPress - open source, free, great tool
How to get started in WordPress - here
http://www.soapblox.net/

GSAC Blogging and Web Design