Introduction: What is Blogging?

Blogging is a term refering to a web logs, which is a collection of online dated entries describing news on a certain subject. Blogging is an essential part of any organization’s new media strategy and a well-kept, frequently updated blog can catalyze marketing campaigns already underway. In addition, the categorization power of blogs allows for resources to be accessible in a way that filters signal from noise.

Wordpress

For this first blogging tutorial, we will be working with the Wordpress blogging platform. An advantage of wordpress is that the Wordpress organization offers both the ability to host on their servers, or the option of hosting their software on your servers.

Other Platforms

Most other blogging platforms borrow concepts from Wordpress’s publishing model. Specifically, the concept of a page versus a post. Wordpress considers a page to be a static web page that rarely changes and has an easily-accessible url. An example of this is an /about/ page, which lists what the entire site is about and may be irregularily updated with links to features. On the other hand, a post is a time-sensitive entry, and is usually found with a date in the url, such as: /blog/2012/03/08/some-post. Posts will show up in people’s newsfeeds, and typically on the front page of the site. Although pages and posts can both have categories, it is more typical to only categorize a post.

Administrating your Dynamic Site

At its heart, all a blog is a dynamic website. Like all dynamic websites, this website is editable using a normal web-browser. In order to protect against anonymous, un-verified edits, users are typically given administration access. The amount of access given to a user account depends on the role of the user. For example, a user with an author role may not edit or delete the posts of others, but a user with an editor role may. The admin role always has full access to the site (and can grant roles to other users) so there should always be a textual account of who has admin roles on a given site.

Logging in and Administrating

Logging in

Log into your wordpress admin site by going to http://<yoursite>/wp-admin¹

where <your site> is your domain name, such as example.com. Enter your username and password and click Log In to log in.

Once you are logged in, you will be greeted with an admin menu:

At this menu, you will want to click on Posts. This will list all of the blog posts on the site:

Creating, Previewing, Publishing, and Deleting Posts & Pages

Creating a New Post

To create a post, click on the Add New link on the Posts menu. You will be presented with a web form similar to this one:

Adding Media to your Post

To add images or other media to the post, click on the Upload button between the Title field and the Content textarea. You will be asked to upload your files in a menu such as this one:

When you click on Browse Files, your browser will open a filebrowser which you can use to navigate around the files in your computer to find the media you need. In this example, an image is being selected for uploading to the site from the ubuntu filebrowser:

Once the image is uploaded, you can add textual details and metadata about the image. It is important to input some metadata so that Google can read the page well. It is also important to input metadata so that media organization doesn’t grow into an extreme burden. Metadata also allows you to add a caption to the image, as well as changing the image alignment and size:

Once you are satisfied with your image details, you may insert it into the post by clicking on the Insert into Post button. You may also make the image into a Feature Image which will be used to represent the blog in menus and post listings:

Publishing your Post

To publish your post, click on the Publish button located to the right of your post title and content:

This menu also contains a Preview button which will display the page on the site without publishing it to the public. It is a best practice to preview your new post before publishing it to the main site (some organizations / blogging platforms require this).

Changing the post time

Notice that the Publish Menu also contains an option Publish Immediately which is bolded. By editing this field, you can change the publish time of your post and defer posting the article to a later date and time. This is useful for writing a series of posts and publishing them over a consistent, frequent time.

Deleting a Post

If you want to remove a post, click on the Move to Trash link in red on the Publish Menu. The site will confirm that you want to delete the post, click ‘yes’ to delete the post.

Managing Events in Wordpress — Yellow Belt

Additional Resources

Footnotes

user’s information.

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