A blog is a great way of getting your thoughts on the web, and there are plenty of free services. Some of the most popular are WordPress.com and LiveJournal, but this tutorial will cover the popular Blogger (they all work similarly).

When you first go to Blogger.com, click on the "CREATE YOUR BLOG NOW" button to create an account. You'll be prompted for a username and password, the name of your new blog, and a color theme.

Once you've logged in, and when you go to Blogger.com in the future, you'll see your Dashboard. The dashboard is a central control panel on Blogger. From here, you can view your blog, add new posts, change your blog's layout, and change your account settings.

If you click the "New Post" link, you'll be taken to the New Post page, where you can type a new blog entry.

Type a title for the post in the Title field, and the text of your blog post in the big text box. You can use the buttons just above the big text box to format your post with bold, italics, pictures, etc. When you're done writing your post, click the "PUBLISH POST" button at the bottom of the window.

Congrats! You've created a blog and posted to it.

Note the tabs at the top of the window. These take you to different areas of the site, where you can edit your blog in different ways.

• Posting lets you write new posts and edit posts you've already written. You can also write a new post, then save it as a draft (unpublished, but still saved, so you can return later and finish it).
• Settings lets you change your blog's name, description, and other various settings (like whether you want comments).
• Layout lets you change the color scheme and visual organization of the elements on your blog.