Setting up a Blog on Blogger

Given the number of academics in the world, there are surprisingly few blogs on psychology and research methods. There are many possible reasons. Two barriers are: 1) lack of knowledge of the ease of creating a blog; and 2) lack of knowledge of the benefits of having a blog.

The details below set out my setup for my blog account and my blogging statistics. When I set it up originally, I did look into the various options in terms of blogging providers and so on. I make no claim to my choices being optimal for me or other people. But I have found them more than adequate for my purposes. In particular, usage statistics (and comments) are a great form of feedback that is not necessarily available in other forms of academic communication. For further discussion of the benefits of blogging and related technologies in academic, Gideon Burton provides a great exposition.
1. Setting up the blog:

• I set up my blog with Blogger.

2. Blogging Statistics:

• Website use statistics. I set up Google Analytics (see Andy Wibbels discussion). This gives me lots of great statistics about such things as the hit count for specific posts, number of visitors and page views over time, and country of the visitors. 
• Feed use statistics. I set up a feed using Google Feed Burner at http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeromyanglim. This tells me: number of subscribers; number of readers reading a feed; number of readers clicking on a feed. (see, link 1; link 2).
• Statistics on blog status in blogosphere: I set up an account on Technorati. It provides information about who is linking to my blog and additional indexes of the success.

3. Customisations:

• I prefer the title of my post to appear before the title of my blog.
• I wanted to expand the width and layout of my blog (see, Blogger Buster)
• I use jump breaks to only show a part of a blog post on the blog home page, while still allowing full posts to be sent via RSS feeds. Using jump breaks allow people to get an overview of the contents of the site from the home page. They also provide better usage statistics regarding the popularity of particular posts.
• I set up the site with Google webmaster tools and created a site map.
• Remove Blogger Banner
• I use the now obsolete Microsoft Front Page to remove formatting from some blog posts, when Blogger's own HTML code gets out of control.
  
• Incorporating R code using Sweave
• Shortcut keys in Blogger
• Including code in a blog post
• Including screen captures and videos
• I removed one third party widget because it crashed Internet Explorer. The lesson from this experience is to check that the blog works in all major browsers adding widgets or changing the template.

4. Improving the blog:

• 10 things to consider
• Building a blogging readership
• It can be useful to know a little HTML (the basis of  posts) and a little java script (the basis of the Blogger template) [tutorial on java script]