This page, and others, are still under development. Thank-you for your patience.

What are Advanced Features?
      Blogs are still first and foremost a writing/reading venue. However with technology there are many options for other media, or other gadgets, if you will, and the ability to link and connect to other websites and blogs on the Internet.

Setting up Gadgets
      In blogger.com there are nearly 2500 gadgets. Many are very similar, others are novel and fun but somewhat unnecessary. Blogger.com provides about twenty basic gadgets. To add gadgets to your blog page, click on Customize near the upper right corner of your blog, or click on Layout on you "blogger" page.

      On the next screen you will see a sketchy view of your blog with at least one, but typically several, rectangles with the phrase: Add a Gadget. When you click on this rectangle, another webpage comes up lookiing much like the image on the left. Now the work begins. We'll discuss this more in Managing a Blogging.

      Typically blogger.com will include several gadgets such as Followers, Blog Archive, and About Me. Followers allows your readers to click on Follow and then you will see who is routinely reading your blog. Blog Archive will list each of your entries or posts so you and readers can go back to previous entries to read them. About Me allows the reader to look at some information about the writer. What they see depends on what you enter.

      A couple gadgets that are fairly straight forward are Text, Picture, Slideshow and VideoBar. These allow you to add just what they say. Blog Llist, Link List and List allow you to include the URLs (addresses) of other blogs, websites and just a list of [unlinked] things. This is helpful when you wish to connect to other related blogs, and it always shows the most recent entry, or just let others know what websites and "things" [like books] you conisder important.

      The Subscription Links is interesting. It helps readers to tell their computers to watch your blog and tell them when you make a new entry. This is redundant because it's a part of the basic page anyhow.

More Gadgets
      You will notice on the left there are more options for gadgets including More Gadgets which includes almost 2500 more (on February 1, 2010). You're welcome and encouraged to find ones that will enhance your blogs. You can search by using the Search option in the upper right corner.

     You may consider a calendar, slideshow formatted differently than the one originally offered, a newspaper, an animated images of a fish bowl, links to Amazon or Google or Bing or some of your other favorite sites.