Blog Tips for New Bloggers

Entering your blog entries yourself is easy, but it does take a bit of practice.  Below are some instructions that will help get you started:

  1. Go to the page that I linked you to earlier, click on your story for example.  
  2. At the very bottom of the page, you will see a red "sign in".  Click that.  It takes you to a username/password sign in.  
  3. user: ???     password: ???  
  4. you will see the menu bar on the left side changes slightly, and you will have "Administration" with "add entry", Blogroll, categories, etc.  Click on "Add Entry".  
  5. In there, you can enter the title, author (this should automatically be your Username, but just in case, make sure to select your name), and the date defaults to today's date.  
  6. You can start typing in the field.  You can highlight and create bold words or lists, and at the bottom of the page, is a checkbox for publish.  If you will be working on the article and don't want it published just yet, you can uncheck this box.  
  7. It is important to click "save post" periodically in order to save your work, and not get timed out.  If the blog is stagnant for 15-20 minutes, you may lose your work if it isn't saved.  Therefore, I suggest working in notepad if you expect it to be a longer entry, and then pasting the text into the blog, un-checking "publish" and hitting "save" right away.  Then you can work inside the blog for fine-tuning.  
  8. Once you check the publish box and hit "save post", it goes live on the site.  Eventually your posts may feed to the home page which tends to update about 15 minutes after publish.  

Blog Admin


Below are some questions from previous bloggers that I answer below about the other sections in the blog:


A few questions for you, now that I'm rolling along with this blog:

  1. How do I post under the "Friends" category, and what does that mean?
  2. Where can I put links to the other blogs that I read regularly?
  3. How do I create links within my blog entries that will take readers directly to articles, sites, reviews, etc. on the web?
  4. What are Blogroll, Pages, and Referrers and should I care?
  5. Some of my blog entries are actually more like articles.  Should I send that type of thing to you so you can post on the main page?
  6. Should I continue to submit "Tips" to you?


Answers:

Questions 1 and 2 are actually the same.  If you login, you see a tab called Blogroll.  Here you can add as many website URLs to "friend" or "viewed blogs" as you want.  The setting at the top shows how many will display (3 right now).  Add the title of their blog, description, site, rss feed (you will have one of these soon as well, it is just a URL to which  people can link directly to your content, minus design).  Click on the XFN tags that apply.  You can't make up your own tags, but you have several to choose from.  Pick the most significant ones that apply.

Links – YES – we love links.  So the more you can put into an article or blog, the better!  The more links you have, the more relevant your site is, and the more hits you're likely to get.  This is all good stuff, and eventually, when you have ads on your blog, will be important to you.  You will probably want to go back through and add links wherever you can (Bellingham YMCA, stores, books, blogs, etc)  Here's how:

  1. Highlight the word(s) you want to be the link
  2. click on the link icon (to the right of the spell-check)
  3. You must have popups enabled, and one will appear
  4. Enter the url starting with http://www
  5. Target should open in a NEW window
  6. Title is something like "Mindfly Web Design and Development", or the full name/business title/persons blog title.  If you don't know it, all web pages have a title at the top of the browser window. Your blog title is always the title of your blog entry.
  7. You can leave XFN blank or you can fill in terms from the blogroll choices  If you fill in the XFN, you may get noticed faster. 
  8. Pages and Referrers are for people that have a website associated with the blog.  These features are not used in most of our blogs.



Is it a Blog or an Article? (Specifically for Neighborhood-Kids.com bloggers) 

We love having both of them.  If you feel it's a better article, then send it that way.  Articles will have to have photos associated though.  Photos are excellent, even in your blogs.  For example, in an entry about Christmas, you could shoot a photo of a Christmas ornament, tree, nativity scene, or anything around your place.  Throw it in the mix.  People love them and photos really spice up any entry, making it easier and more fun to read.  If you're having trouble coming up with photos, but want to put some in, you could consider a stock photo.  http://www.istockphoto.com  has lots of stock photos, and also is good for ideas (they only cost $1 each, so if you find one that is perfect, we can buy it for your article).  Anyway, we can get stock photos for your articles, but they have more power if the photos are related i.e. coming from you.  If you're uncomfortable having your personal pics online, shoot close-ups, partials, things, animals, trails, etc.  It doesn't have to be obvious who it is in order to be interesting.  Also, it can help if you can crop or resize your photos.  You may be able to do this on your computer, but if you don't have the time, you can add it into your entry at a later time, or use Flickr to manage your photos.  You can also edit your entry/photos after posting.

Posting older entries is great.  Keep in mind though, that blogs are chronological by default.  So, if you're writing from the past, make sure to change the date.

Again, please let us know if you are working on one of our blogs and you have photo questions.  If you have a program that lets you resize and crop, photo editing could be a big timesaver and maybe even a bit fun for you.


Tips For Blog Formatting:

  1. When you’re writing blog entries, try to break up the content into short (2-3 sentence) paragraphs.  By separating the content into short snippets, it is easier for people to scan, which is what they want to do on the internet most of the time.  If you still want longer paragraphs, try having a short first paragraph, and then moving into longer ones for the 2nd and so forth.  This mostly helps with the home page, where only the first bit of content is showing.  
  2. Also, if you want to make lists, they are very nice to the eyes.  Just enter the items you want in a list, hitting “enter” in between, then highlight them and click on the “unordered list” (bulleted list) or “ordered list” (numbered list) icon in the toolbar.  It is important, however, if you are going to add a list, put it in toward the end of the entry, or at least put it far enough down so it won’t show up in the sidebar on the home page.   
  3. Finally, Adding photos to the blog is made simpler by using Flickr

Visit this blog entry for more information on using Flickr.