Creating a Crafting Blog

This morning, while reading some stuff on the Hive, I came across this post, which discussed some options about creating blogs and using them as marketing. I was specifically struck by this quote:
"It works for you when you go on vacation, when you sleep, and even when you're feeling ill. It even eliminates the need for "what do you do" type meetings because it tells potential clients (or customers) what services you offer, what products you have for sale, and how they can be purchased."

Thinking about it, I realized that this is totally true, and if I was going to keep some kind of rambling blog posts over on the Hive, I might as well create a more general blog on Blogspot, and go ahead and link back to this instead. As when I started writing over there, I have no idea if I'll keep this up, but I know that at the moment I'm really enjoying disseminating information about what I'm doing more widely, so here goes.

Creating this has proved to be more involved than I thought, yet easier than I remembered. This is the, er, third time I've tried starting a blog on Blogspot (the topics for the other two, by the way, were Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series and the New York Mets, two things near and dear to my heart). I remember it seeming overwhelming. This time, it really didn't. What made it more involved is that google has definitely added a lot of different and new options since the last time I did this. Using them seemed very intuitive, though.

As part of the process, I considered a few things:
1. What do I want a blog to do and say?
2. How would I want a blog to look if I were using it? Where would I want to be able to find things?
3. How do other people's blogs look? What about them do I like? What do I not like?

Based on this, I went to work, and when I was pretty satisfied, I went and looked at about ten blogs kept by friends or those who I am following on the Hive. Based on what I saw there, I made a few changes, added a couple features, changed a little bit of layout, and reconsidered some of my own color choices.

I'm fairly happy with the results so far. If you are reading this, I'd love some feedback!