Getting Started

Welcome to the weblog of the Year 7 Ingerland project.  This thread of posts in the tutorial category will help you customise the blog and upload work to it. I thought we could work through the Year 7 blog and then you can update the year 8-10 blogs.

Go down to the bottom of these posts to start.

 

Header Image

With this style of blog you can change the header image (the picture at the top). Let’s do this.

Click on,

Dashboard / Presentation / Custom header image / upload / crop

You will need to play around with colour of text so you can actually see it.

 

Comment moderation

I’ve set the default to be that comments have to go via the Administrator before they are published. You can change this is you want to allow comments without moderation by clicking,

Dashboard / Options / Discussion and then unclicking the box below

Before a comment appears:

• An administrator must approve the comment

 

the Manage function

This function is really useful as it’s how you go back to edit posts or delete them.

Remember what i said about posts being automatically saved in the uncategorized category. Go back to the ‘How to create a new post’ post which is saved in 2 categories and unclick the uncategorized one, then save again

You can change the default category for your posts. If you are just posting to one category the majority of the time, like now for example, I’m just posting to the tutorial category, I could have (and should have!) changed the default to Tutorial.  You do this by clicking,

Dashboard / Options / Writing / Default post category (change to what you want) 

Similarly, you can manage Pages, Categories and Comments through the Manage function. In terms of managing Comments, if comments are allowed without moderation, then this is where you can delete them if they are inappropriate. The next post will deal with moderation.

 

How to add links to the blog roll

The blogroll section on the right is for any websites or weblogs you can to link to. This is where we will link to the other celebration of language blogs. Click,

 Dashboard / Bookmark / Add Bookmark  / Add Url, Name and Description (this appears when you hover the mouse over the link)

This link will automatically get saved to the Blogroll section

 

How to create a new page

The About page is for a general description of the project.  You might want to create other pages, maybe to upload photos, or to write a report about the project, or to write other related articles.

 Creating a new page is very similar to creating a new post. There are 2 ways to do it.

Dashboard / Write / Page

or

Dashboard / Manage / Pages / Create new page

You can decide if you want comments or not on your page in the Discussion / Allow Comments tickbox

 

How to write a post: advanced

You can either allow comments on your post or not. This is on the discussion tab on the right hand side.  We can set a default for comments also. We’ll come to that later. But this function allows you greater control over each post you write.

You can also post images, using the upload function underneath the New Post box. Once you’ve uploaded, click and drag image into text box. You can resize here also.

 

How to write a post

Dashboard / Write / Post / tick the correct category, scrolling down if necessary.

Alternatively, you post via the New Post tab, to the right of the Dashboard tab.

If you’re writing a post and you decide you need a new category, the add function on the right allows you to do this from this page rather than have to go to the category section.

If you don’t click a category it gets saved to the uncategorized (general) category. In fact, if you don’t UNTICK the uncategorized category, it’ll get saved there anyway, which i find a bit messy so remember to UNTICK this category if you don’t want your post saved there.

If you’re drafting a post, just save it below and the post will be saved as a draft (and not published).

If you want to publish straightaway, hit publish. You can always edit post or delete it later.

 

Setting up and Managing Categories

As we have a set up a static page as our front page, all your posts are filed under categories. So let’s organise the categories you may want.

Dashboard / Manage / Categories  to add a category

If you can’t see these categories yet it’s because of Note below ….

Note:
Categories will appear on your blog once you have posted something in them. Empty categories remain invisible.

So maybe we could try to post something to these categories to practice posting and make the categories appear.

 

Setting a static page as main page

Most blogs are diary style, in chronological order. However, this blog serv has a function to allow you to put a static page as your front page and i think this might be useful for the archive. let’s do this,

Dashboard / Options / Reading / change front page to the About page