Valentines Day and NO Cookies?! Tips on Blogging

In case I haven't told you before, I'm a DORK. It is Valentines Day and I spent all week making beautiful Valentine cookies in every shape and design I could think of. Was I smart enough to put some aside for my family - uh nope. Dork! So Nick and I made Whoopie Pies tonight for the first time. I'm waiting for him to get home from karate class so that we can try them out in celebration of Valentines Day.

I woke up this morning to some pretty bad weather. With the roads all wet and dangerous, all the club bike rides got canceled. Since I decided not to bake cookies today and the ride was canceled, I knew it was going to be a productive day. I got lots of work done in my home office and I finally took the time to learn a lot about blogging. I had lots of people suggesting that I create a blog about my cookie baking. I know quite a bit of HTML and web design, but blogging was a whole new challenge. I started my blog on January 25th and have had almost 600 hits from friends, family, cookiers and cyclists. It's been a really fun learning experience.

From utilizing a lot of Google searches and reading lots of tutorials, I figured out how to offer email subscriptions to my readers... see that box over on the right hand side, sign up and you can get quickie emails of Cristin's Cookies updates. I changed my template. I made tabs of the pages. I changed the font and colors. I made a link to my Facebook page. I created a search box. I also finally figured out how to create a button that others can add to their blog. That one I've been trying for a while unsuccessfully. Once I got it down, I was able to add buttons of other blogs that I enjoy too. I labeled all my posts and made a list for easy reference. The biggest thing that I figured out is how to change that little orange & white blogger button into my own design. That was a mind-bender at first as my photo program provided challenges, but I was excited to finally get it right. It's called a "favicon" for those wanting to change theirs. You have to create an icon that is 16x16 pixels, save it as a .ico or .png file and add some coding to the html page and you're good to go. Do a search on Google "how to change blogger icon" and give it a try so yours can be personalized too.

I'm very happy with my new blog and hope you enjoy it too. Let me know what you think!