Steve Harris Historiography

How do I get a blog on UMW Blogs?
To setup a blog on UMW Blogs go to the sign-up page and enter a username, e-mail address (you must use your UMW email), and a password. Make sure the "Gimme a site!" radio button is selected.

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View larger version on Flickr here.

Once you have done this, you will be taken to a page that asks you to specify a domain (this can be anything you like, however there can be no spaces and no special characters- only letters and numbers), enter a blog title (you can change this later on), and select the privacy settings for your blog. (Note: Once you've setup your blog, you will be able to further customize your privacy settings.)

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View larger version on Flickr here.

Once these steps are all completed, you should receive an e-mail confirming that you do, indeed, want a blog. (Be sure to check your Junk Mail folder when looking for the email - sometimes it ends up there.) Click on the link in the e-mail to activate your blog and log into your account.

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://hist471a8f11.umwblogs.org

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

http://hist471a8f11.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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Once I have a blog, where and how do I log in?
First things first, where is your blog? Your individual blogs should be located at the address you specified on UMW Blogs. Your initial blog address is determined by the domain you choose when creating your blog. For example, if the domain you chose is "myblog" your blog address will be http://myblog.umwblogs.org.

If you go to this address, you will see the public "front-end" of your blog. In addition to this view, you have an administrative (private) "back-end" for your blog, where you can add and edit posts/pages, change your theme, activate plugins, and, more generally administer your blog's content and appearance.

There are two ways to access the administrative back-end of your blog:
 * 1) Go to http://www.umwblogs.org and enter your Username and Password in the "Login" block on the right.
 * 2) Go to your blog's URL and add the following to the end of the address: "/wp-admin" (no quotes) - the address should look like the following:

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

Once you are there, you will see two fields asking for your login and password, as pictured below.

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View original image on Flickr here

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.

Important: You will need to be sure to categorize your posts as either "Class Discussion" or "Book Histories" depending on the nature of the post.

How do I get my post to show up on the course blog?
In order for your posts to show up on the course blog two things need to happen.


 * Your blog must be public. To make sure this is the case, go to Settings --> Reading in your blog's dashboard and make sure your blog is one of the two top privacy settings. It should be either openly indexed by search engines or blocked from search engines, but still accessible without a password.

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You MUSTalso tag every post with the "hist297harris" tag (no quotes all one word).

Finally, you MUST enter your main URL and feed URL into the boxes on the Historiogrpahy course blog. Go to the main course blog, look for the Add Feed widget on the right side of the page, and enter your main URL and feed URLs as instructed.

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If all of these conditions are met your posts should automatically show up on the course site.

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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How do I add a video from YouTube?
To quickly embed a YouTube video, simply copy the video’s URL from your web browser’s address bar while viewing the video:

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And paste it on a line by itself in your post/page editor:

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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.

How do I create pages?
For this course you will need to create a series of pages on your blog to showcase your research. To do this, go to the dashboard of your blog and select Pages ---> Add New.

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Under "Add New Page" enter the name for your page in the Title box. After that, you provide the relevant content and then and click Publish. You can always return to any page or post and edit it or add more content to them later. What's more, you can rename them to more accurately reflect your chosen topic at that time.

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Using Custom Menus
This tutorial will discuss how to use the custom menus along with a short description on how custom menus can aid you in more clearly organizing your site.

The custom menus can be activated by going into the backend of your site. The example site for the tutorial is http://fail.umwblogs.org. In your main menu, you will see an option for custom menus, go ahead and click that which will take you to another page:

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At this point we can create a custom menu which will make use of any user-crated categories. Another excellent addition is the use of other websites URLs as a menu option. After you click save on the main screen, you can then select our newly created menu.

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Refresh your page and you now have slick tabs along your header.

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If you are not interested in having tabs in your header, you can turn off your custom menu and move towards the widgets (under appearance) option. From there, simply activate the custom menus option and drag it to where you want it on your page. You can now see that the menus are no longer in the header, but in our sidebar.

1: Moving to the widgets option

2: Selecting the custom menu widget

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3: Revisit your page to see your new sidebar menu

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