Keeping Up with the Bloggers

I used to consider myself to be pretty good with technology. I’ve had my own computer since I was about 14 years old, and have never had much trouble using one. But last summer, when I decided that I wanted to start my own “mommy blog”, I realized that I don’t know as much as I thought I did.

My website is pretty basic and bare bones. I chose to purchase my own domain (as suggested by Jen at Absolutely Bananas), but had to read most of this book to figure out how to put my WordPress blog together. And even still, everything is pretty straightforward. I chose a template, filled in the pieces, and presto change-o, there was the beginning of reanbean.com.

But I read a lot of other blogs, and realize that there are other cool features out there. Some have buttons and widgets and places that show the followers. How did they do that? And how did they know how to do that?

To enter a couple of giveaways, I became an official follower of a couple of blogs I read regularly. But I still don’t get what it means to be an official follower. I know it means that I now “count” as a follower for that person’s blog, but does it benefit me in some way that I’ve yet to realize?

And what is a Google Reader? A few of my readers have told me that I’m on their Google Reader (or something like that) but I have absolutely no idea what that means. I can only hope it’s a good thing.

So tell me this- how did you learn to create your blog and incorporate the many features that can make a blog attractive and flashy? Did you hire a fancy-pants designer or are you just that talented?