Jan
26
Notes on blogging
January 26, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
Here are some final thoughts, tips, and suggestions before you begin your regular weekly blogging.
1. Most Important: Make sure the time-stamp on your blog is accurate. Here’s how: Go to options (from your dashboard); scroll down to Date and Time; in the box next to where it reads — Times in the weblog should differ by — it should say -4 or -5 (just substract from the standard/default time listed there in order to make your timestamp accurate).
2. Housekeeping — cleaning up your blog: You might want to make some changes to make your blog more “official” by getting rid of the “hello world” or any sort of test posts you might have that aren’t actually a part of your collection of posts. To do this: Go to manage (from your dashboard); make sure “Posts” is chosen. You should see a list of all your posts and to the right side of the screen you have the option to view, edit, or delete. Simply delete any posts you don’t want. Also, this is where you will go if you want to edit or make changes to any of your posts after you’ve saved them (as draft) or published them (posts them to the web).
3. It has come to my attention that depending on what view of the textbox you’re in, you might not see a button that reads “link.” This has made it a bit confusing for some people to create links, as suggested by my previous guidelines. If you don’t have words (letters) above your textbox, you have little pictures. To create a link, the one your are looking for has a little chain link on it. Use that. Be sure that you are also breaking your link in the proper place (you might need to use the little broken chain icon button to do this). Some of you have blog entries that are linked in their entirety. Part of writing effective blog entries is choosing when and where to link, which words make the most sense and are most appropriate to act as a link. See, for example, above, when I referenced my previous entry, I mentioned it and created a link out of that reference. Notice that the rest of the words are not links — only the words I chose.
4. Also regarding linking — as you read blogs (including this one), you will probably note that blog writers don’t include the whole long URL in the midst of their writing. This is disruptive to the reading of the text. This goes back to #2 and the idea of choosing specific word(s) to act as the link. The URL only gets pasted into the box after you’ve highlighted your word(s) of choice and clicked on the link button. Also, try to embed the links into your writing, as I’ve done here in this sentence with the word “links” — the links are a part of your writing, not separate from it.
5. Extra Credit: Create an “about me” section. To do this choose “manage” and “pages” (from your dashboard). You should see an About page listed there. Choose edit on the right side of the screen. Get rid of the default text that is there (something about this being a wordpress blog) and get creative. Remember this is a public blog, so you might want to filter/limit the information you include in this section. Ideas for this include (but are certainly not limited to):
- Write an autobiography in fourteen lines, starting from the present moment.
- List ten random bits of information about you
- Describe why you are blogging
- Explain what brought you to the point where you are now in your life
