By JEFF REINITZ

Courier Staff Writer

www.blogger.com

Have you ever wondered why Microsoft Explorer tortures its users with both an hourglass and a (lack of) progress bar as they wait for the browser to crank from one Web site to the next?

This is one of the musings readers might be able to explore on my new "blog" - that is if the blog-posting program ever decides to work when I use it.

Blogs - short for "Web logs" - are electronic diaries made public through the wonders of the World Wide Web.

For this column, I decided to start my own blog with the help of Blogger (www.blogger.com), which is a site with a free point-and-click system for creating and updating online journals.

Writers can use the site to post a daily set of rants, observations and opinions to their own FTP space or set up the files at Blogger's Blog Spot.

The program is easy to use. There are cookie-cutter templates to get the graphic design started. From there, users simply type up whatever is on their minds, attach a photo or a Web site link by pressing a few buttons and post it. Blogger even keeps track of the journal entries' dates.

Experts can add in their own html strings to tweak the look.

The problem I had was posting. The first half a dozen or so times I tried, something kept locking up. It might have been me hitting the wrong buttons, or it might have been something with our Internet connection.

By the time one entry finally got through, my message was "I kept trying to set a blog. Did this actually work?"

It has worked fine since then.

Even if you don't want to share your opinions with the rest of the world or, in my case, don't have much on the mind these days, you can still tap in to Blogger to read other people's blogs.

The sidebar on Blogger's home page links to the most recently created and most recently updated journals. These change by the second, which is a testament to the popularity of activity.

The blogs run the spectrum from mildly amusing to a total waste of time.

One man uses his blog to wax philosophic on developments in the marketing world; another group banters back and forth with tired arguments about gun control. One person posted "blah" 337 times for a journal entry.

Sibling Rivalry, a blog billed as "Two siblings duking it out across the ocean" appears promising, but the link wasn't working when I tried it.