Adding content

Posts

The main purpose of your blog is to fill it with your content. In the “Posts” block in your dashboard you can edit existing posts or add new ones.

1. Edit: You see all your blog posts in an overview and can make necessary changes to them here.
   

   Overview of all the posts in your blog for easy access

When you move your mouse over the title of a post, you get further options. Click on “Edit” when you want to change text, use “Quick Edit” if you only need to change the title, “Delete” your post if you want to or “View” it in a browser window .

1. Add New: This is your place to write your blog posts. Always give your posts a title. Depending on your blog settings, it may even appear in the URL for this post. The visual editor provides you a number of styling options, e.g. bold, italics, indented for you to use in your post. Do not forget to assign your post to a category and / or describe it with one or more tags.
2. Post Tags: You can make up tags on the “Add New” page. However, you can also prepare tags here in advance or change them later on.
3. Categories: As with tags, you can create categories in “Add New”. It is helpful to assign a category to each post to keep them organized.

Example

You use your blog for general reflections and two courses (“Learning” and “Educating”). Each time you write a blog post, you assign it a category. The posts all appear in chronological order on your blog, but in addition, you can view them according to categories. Thus, if you or your teacher only want to know what you have written for your course “Learning”, you can go to that category’s page quickly and see all your posts on “Learning”. Your teacher can also subscribe to this category alone and not to your entire blog to be alerted when you posted a new entry in that category.

Having assigned categories to posts, you can often create a menubar for them in a theme that allows for a menubar.

Media

You can upload media files such as images and videos before writing a blog post or for use in a page. However, you can always add them when you write your blog entry or create a page as well.

1. Library: All your media files are displayed here. You can quickly check if you have attached them, i.e. used them, in a blog post by looking at the column “attached to”.
   

   Overview of the media files in your blog

2. Add New: Add an image, video file or PDF to the library for later use in a post or page. If you have trouble with the flash uploader, click on “Browser uploader” instead.
   

   Add a new media file to your blog to be used in a post or page

You only have a limited amount of space for uploading files to your blog (20 MB). Thus, you may want to upload your images, videos etc. to a different (free) service such as flickr, Youtube, slideshare etc. if you are allowed to make these media files public.

Links

Blogs often also display links to other sites. The links (URL, title, brief description) are entered in this part of the dashboard. With the help of a widget you can display them in a sidebar.

Pages

You can utilize static pages to provide information that does not change frequently, e.g. your contact details and information about yourself. Regular blog content is written in posts. Adding pages to your blog works similar to adding posts. However, you cannot assign categories or tags to a page, but put it into a hierarchy of other pages.

Comments

When you have comments turned on for your blog, you can administer them in this section of the dashboard.