New year coming, new time in my life starting, new blog. Today is the start of Out Flying A Kite, hence known as OFAK. This is the first post and I am simultaneously writing this post and building the blog.The first thing to do when you want to start a blog on Blogger is: get a gmail account.

Go there, figure out your email name and set up the account. I find that checking the availability of your name is the hardest part. With millions of users, lots of Gmail account names are already taken. Be creative or add numbers. That's what I ended up doing - I added the year number 2010 to mine.

After you set up your email account, come back to Blogger and log in with your Gmail information. Create a blog, which requires making up a name and web address. You might want to think about this before you jump in. You can always change your name easily, but to change the web address, you will have to create a new blog. If you have done much in the way of changing the template and personalizing things toward a specific name, this means your previous work will have to be changed. This can be time consuming. Also if you happen to have readers/followers, you could lose them in the switch. So it's easier and smarter to just pick something and stick with it.

First off, I found a template I liked. Blogger's generic templates are so boring. And there are tons of creative people out there who like to make and share templates. So a lot of work right there has been done for you. My favorite site for finding templates is BTemplates. They keep up to date with the new templates being put out and have an easy to find your way around website. Clicking on demo beneath the template will give you a full-size view of what it looks like live. Click the download button beneath it and you can save the template to your computer. Once you find one you like and download it, it's easy to change your blog template. Go to Layout on your Blogger dashboard and click the edit HTML. Click browse and upload the template you just downloaded. Be aware you can't just click on the folder, you must click on the XML file and then click upload. You will probably be asked to confirm deletion of some modules. It's ok, you can always reinsert modules later. After you save the template, go to view blog and see if it's what you want. If it is, now is the time to play and figure out what things you want on the sidebars of your blog.

Go back to Layout and click on the Page Elements tab. There you will be able to pick and choose different modules. Blogger has a lot of them already pre-made. To me, my favorite is adding HTML/Java. With this module, you can put in different things you find out on the web. As I said before, it's play time. Put in things, check them out on your blog after you save them. Keep or remove them until you get the design you like. The design you created. Fun! Fun!