UMW Blogs Howto for Course Sites

How do I get a username?
Please note: ''If you already have a blog and/or a username on UMW Blogs you can skip this step and go on to the next one. Remember that you can only have one username.''

To get a username on UMW Blogs go to the sign-up page and enter a username and e-mail address (you must use your UMW email). Make sure the "Just a username, please" radio button is selected. After that, your username and password will be emailed to your UMW email address. Once you click the confirmation link, you will then be able to navigate to the course site, login, and add yourself as a user (see the below for step-by-step directions).

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Once I have a username, where and how do I log in?
First things first, where is your course blog? Well, if you are reading this you are probably on it. Look for a login link in the sidebar, and login into the site which will most likely push you back to the front page of the course blog. After that, look for the "Add me" button on the front page of the course blog and click it.

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After that you will automatically become an author of the course blog, and you should now be able to login to the backend. If you don't see a login or site admin link, append /wp-admin to the course URL. In other words if your course site is as follows:

http://mycourse.umwblogs.org

You would append wp-admin, and it would look as follows:

http://mycourse.umwblogs.org/wp-admin

Which should bring you to the login screen for the backend. Once you are there, you will see two fields asking for your login and password, as pictured below.

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How do I change my password?
When you sign up for a blog, you will be given an automatically-generated password. It's a good idea to change your password first thing. To do this, login to your blog, go to the Users tab on the left side in the administrative back-end, and click on the Your Profile subtab. From here you can enter your personal information and change your password at the bottom of this page.

How do I get an avatar?
Go to GRavatar and associate an avatar of your choice with the email you use on UMW Blogs. GRavatar is an external service that links avatars with e-mail addresses so that anytime you comment on another blog with that e-mail address your avatar will show up if enabled on that particular blog.

How do I write a post?
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This section is where you can write new blog posts and edit existing posts. Writing a post (as opposed to a page which is distinct from blog posts because pages remain outside of the blog's reverse chronology) is probably the lion's share of how you will use your blog. When writing a new post you can control the status, i.e., make the posts a draft, password protected, etc. You can also change the time stamp to control when the post shows up in the blogs chronology of posts.

Additionally, you can add categories and tags to posts to create a taxonomy of terms and sections in your site. You can add tags and categories while writing a new post or editing and existing post. And the sub-sections "Tags" and "Categories" allow you to manage tags and categories across all your posts. Note that your professors will be asking you to categorize posts in very specific ways---you must do this to credit credit for your post.

How do I upload an image or document and place it in a post or page?
You can easily upload documents and images into a post or page. Doing this is relatively straightforward. Go to Posts &rarr; Add New and look for the "Add image" and/or the "Add media" buttons (the "Add Image" button looks like a monitor and the "Add media" button looks like a gray asterisk, as pictured below.

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When you click on the button, a dialog box will appear offering you the option to upload a image or file from your hard drive. Once you have located your file click on the "Upload" button.

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Alternatively, if you want to link directly to an image or file that is already online just click on the From URL tab and insert the URL and click "Insert into Post" button.

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If uploading a file from your hard drive, you will get a dialog box asking you to title the document/image, as well as to provide a caption and description---both of which are optional. Once you are done, click on the "Insert into Post" button and you are done.

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WordPress Automatically converts video links to an embedded video
All you need to do to embed something into a post or page is to post the URL to it into your content area. Make sure that the URL is on its own line and not hyperlinked (clickable when viewing the post).

For example:

Check out this cool video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDNLUzjkpg

WordPress will automatically turn that into a YouTube embed when the post is viewed. If it is not working check the "Auto-embeds" check box in Settings > Media SubPanel to make sure the appropriate settings is checked.

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What Sites Can I Embed From?
 * YouTube (only public videos and playlists - "unlisted" and "private" videos will not embed)
 * Vimeo
 * DailyMotion
 * blip.tv
 * Flickr (both videos and images)
 * Viddler
 * Hulu
 * Qik
 * Revision3
 * Scribd
 * Photobucket
 * PollDaddy
 * WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)
 * SmugMug (WordPress 3.0+)
 * FunnyOrDie.com (WordPress 3.0+)
 * Twitter (WordPress 3.4+)

Using Visual Editor to Embed Videos
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In the visual editor their are a series of video services icons, such as YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc. Click on the appropriate icon and a dialog box will appear asking for the videos URL. Copy the URL, but make sure this isn't a shortened URL such as youtu.be. That's it!

How do I copy and paste word documents?
Click on the button the arrow is pointing to below- affectionately termed the "Kitchen Sink"- in order to get additional options for your editing toolbar.

Go from this:

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to this:

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After following the step above you will see an icon with the MS Word icon in your visual text editor (which the arrow is pointing to). Click on this and copy the Word Document text into this window and save it. This strips out all the MS Word code and "cleans" the text for publishing on WordPress. There may be some minor formatting you have to update afterwards, but most of the formatting from MS Word should remain intact.

More questions?
See the much more thorough support documentation for UMW Blogs here.