Farmer FSEM Faculty Tutorial

How do I get a blog on UMW Blogs?
If you don't already have an account 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 blog!" radio button is selected.

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If you already have a username and password go to the UMW Blogs home page (http://umwblogs.org) and login in there and then click on the "Create a new blog" option.

Once you have done this, you will be taken to a page that asks you to specify a domain (this should be farmeryournamef11, e.g. farmergroomf11), 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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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 blog where and how do I log in?
First things first, where is your course blog? It will be at the URL you specified in the previous step. For example, my blog URL would be as follows: http://farmergroomf11.umwblogs.org

To access the backend you can either click the "Login" link in the sidebar or append wp-admin to your blog URL as follows:

http://farmergroomf11.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 change my blog title?
To change the title of your blog go to the Settings tab on the left side in the administrative back-end and you will see a field for blog title as well as a field for the site tag line, which is a space for a brief description of your site. Just type in a new title or tagline and save the changes.

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What's the difference between writing a post and writing a page?
This is an important terminological/conceptual distinction to grasp, as posts and pages serve radically different functions. A post is an article that shows up in the chronology of your blog. In other words, posts appear in your blog, most recent at the top of the page.

A page is what most folks may be more familiar with. This is a static space that is not part of the chronological logic (try saying that five times fast) of the blog. A page sits outside of this inverted time line, and often features more static content like information about the site, the author, a syllabus, readings, etc.

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 personalized 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.

How do I write a page?
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This section is where you write new page and edit existing pages. The interface for writing a page is almost identical to that for writing a post. The real difference is that the page is meant for static information that stands outside of the time specific flow of information that is the logic of posts. When writing a new page you can control the status, i.e., make the page a draft, password protected, etc. You can also control the order of pages in the navigation menu by using the Custom Menus Tutorial.

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 customize my theme?
The default theme is the TwentyTen theme and I recommend you all stick with this theme because it is realtively simple and allows you to customize your header image, background color, and navigation menus.

Custom Header Image
You can have a custom header for your own blog. To upload an image, just go to the Appearance --> Header section and use the Browse tab to find the image for your header.

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Custom Background Color
You can have a custom background color for your blog. To change the background color just go to the Appearance --> Background section and use the "Select Color" link to see the Hexidecimal color chart. Click on the color family you want from the outer circle colors then select the specific shade in the color square.

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Custom Menus
UMW Blogs recently upgraded to WordPress 3.0, which adds custom menus as a new feature for many templates. In this tutorial I will be discussing how to use the custom menus along with a short description on how custom menus can aid you in more clearly organizing your blog course.

The custom menus can be activated by going into the backend of your blog. Are example blog 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 we click save on the main screen, we 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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What are widgets?
“Widgets” is just a silly buzzword for the functionality built into WordPress that allows you to customize the sidebar of your WordPress site without knowing HTML. You can use widgets to add a list of recent photos, comments, flickr photos, del.icio.us links, and much more. You can find your widgets in the Appearance &rarr; Widgets subtab. You may also get access to more widgets as you activate new plugins, for many of the plugins available have an associated widget, such as flickrRSS. To find out how you can choose from over 5,000 additional widgets, read the tutorial here.

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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.

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

Farmer FSEM Student Tutorial