All three of my sisters and both of my sister-in-laws have a personal blog. And thanks to something DearMYRTLE taught in her More Blogging for Beginners webinar, I, too, have a personal blog.

While I've now published 939 articles in this Legacy News blog, I've stayed away from having a personal blog for a couple of reasons. First, I have wanted a blogging service that is 1) free, 2) very easy to use (so my kids can also blog), and 3) advanced enough to have some design control. While I use and love Typepad for our Legacy News blog I have not wanted to pay the $8.95 a month for their service for a personal blog. (They do have a free service called TypePad Micro, but it does not offer enough of what I want.) Blogger.com's free service has everything I want except that it adds that Blogger nav bar at the top which I have never liked. That nav bar removes the feeling that my blog is mine.

I am so happy DearMYRTLE taught me how to remove that nav bar. Her simple step-by-step instructions included in the webinar-on-CD's handouts gave me exactly what I needed to overcome my personal blogging obstacles.

My personal blog is not much to look at yet. I've left nearly all the settings at their defaults for now. But it has given me an easy way to share my family's happenings with extended family and friends. And since I already had my own domain name of GeoffRasmussen.com, Blogger let me use it for my blog's address. I like http://blog.GeoffRasmussen.com much better than their default of www.GeoffRasmussen.Blogspot.com. If I want, I could restrict my blog so only those I invite can view it.

While we (Legacy Family Tree) were one of the early pioneers of blogging in the genealogy industry, I've been slower to adopt it for personal use, but am excited about it now. As my students at last weekend's Root Cellar Spring Seminar in Sacramento learned, it really is easy to get started. Using Blogger.com, it took us less than three minutes to set up our new blog and begin writing.

If you missed DearMYRTLE's two webinars on Blogging for Beginners, they are available in our webinar-on-CD collection here. Each contain four pages of handouts with simple step-by-step instructions. They give you everything (and more) that you need to enter the blogosphere.

Happy blogging!