What's happening?

At this moment I am unemployed and have quite a lot of time to get things started.

Using a new Blogger theme

First of all, I decided to use one of Blogger's new themes -  just the first option in the "Contempo" line.

I am a bit conservative, and I chose a traditional theme at first. Then I thought "What the heck" and went for the new stuff.

Frankly, I am not quite used to it yet. About an hour has passed so far :). I feel like it is growing on me.

However, if I find it inconvenient or impractical in one of these next few days, I may revert to a more usual theme.

Along with making your blog look more up-to-date, which is on the plus side, it changes the way you may be used to working with the layout on the blog's dashboard, which is not on the plus side.

Keeping the blogspot.com based web address

Second, I specifically chose to keep the URL the Blogger platform allowed me to use  - the third-level subdomain with ".blogspot.com" and not to use some second level ".com" domain as I was going to at first. (I actually selected a few versions and was going to buy them from GoDaddy.)

I have my reasons:

1. It's a far-fetched idea but I suspect that Google favors "blogspot.com" domain names over traditional "com" and other domain names. No proof, just a hunch.
2. At this moment, Google Blogger does not support https for custom domains only for its own "blogspot" subdomains. That's a fact.
3. I am actually see it as a challenge to achieve some tangible SEO results with a "poor" domain name. The blog in my native language I mentioned in my previous post is *.blogspot.com, too.
4. It's easier to disable tracking my own views of this blog that adds "noise" to the built-in statistics.

By the way,  selecting a subdomain for the blogspot.com address is not an easy thing, either. Good stuff is already in use, often with abandoned blogs from before 2010. I need mine to meet certain criteria. That's why I even wrote a small program to help me select a subdomain that could suit me. I may make it public in the future.

It's nothing special, though - type in a subdomain and click "Check" and see if it is already taken or not. There are of course web services out there that help you do the same thing. And you can always use the Blogger's built-in checker, the one you use when you create a new blog with Google Blogger, although I find it less convenient so.

Going personal and non-personal

Third, I am going to experiment with SEO and other stuff, so don't be surprised with purely personal posts alternating with absolutely non-personal ones. That's the idea this blog is based on at the moment.

Sometimes there would be a thin line between personal and non-personal, just because I am trying to write thing from my experience. Something I am familiar with. Something I had to deal with.

With my IT background in various areas from writing articles to writing code, you can expect a lion's share of topics related to the information technologies.

This is what I like to write about and this is what seems to be still popular among internet users.

OK. Let's see how it works.