Check out your "Stats"

Hello grade 8 bloggers,

   Recently, google and blogger have announced that there will be changes made to blogger to make it even easier and more interactive for users (both writers and readers of blogs). Last week we checked out the new views available on blogger. All you have to do is type /view at the end of your blog url, and you have the opportunity to view your blog in five new ways. It's pretty fun to play with. As I played with this, I realized that I want to include more pictures with my blog posts, as some of the views depend on those. This is one of the reasons I love things like this, they show me what I need to continue to work on.

   Also, when I log in to blogger, I have an older user interface than you do. This is because I started my blogger account before recent changes were made. Zak had this issue as well. If you want to be able to use blogger's newest interface, you simply need to change one of your settings. Go to the settings tab, then select "basics", three quarters of the way down the page, you'll have the option to select your post editor, select the most recent one. Tah-dah!

   Finally, I encourage you to check out something I discovered on blogger this weekend. When you are in your editing area of your blog, you will notice tabs like "posting", "comments", "settings" and "design", all of which you are familiar with. There are two other tabs, ignore "monetise" because it adds annoying ads and pop-ups to your blog, but check out "stats". In "Stats", there are several options of how to look at the visitors to your blog. You can see how many people visited each page, based on day, month or all time. You can see where in the world blog visitors have come from. You can see how people found your blog. It's really, really neat.

  Take some time to check these things out once you're all caught up on your assignments.