1. HOW TO DO ALL THAT
BLOGGIN’ STUFF!!!
Or
A Quick Guide to making your blog look
Good!!!

2. Now you have your blog, you need to customise it to suit your self.
This is a quick guide to what’s what...and how to do it!!
So ...log on and get onto your dashboard
You should now be familiar with this screen:
First of all lets look at Settings.
Click the pull down box and go into General.
Your screen will look like this:
You can change the name of your blog and you can put you own Tagline in here.
Make sure you change the time zone to Melbourne. Save the Changes.

3. If you now go to the Discussion tab (under Settings). You will see the following screen.
Make sure the boxes are ticked as shown below. This means if anyone posts a comment on
your blog, you will be notified and can moderate it (You can decide whether it is appropriate or
not). Save the Changes
The next thing you need to look at is Privacy. You can choose who views your blog. For this
course, we want others participants to be able to see what you have been doing, so click the
Second Option: Which allows normal visitors to view your blog, but your blog is blocked to
Search Engines.

4. Ok, now lets look at changing the Appearance of your blog. Click the Themes tab and you will
get to the screen below:
Choose a theme, you can preview them if you like. Once you have done this click the Widgets
tab. Widgets allow you to display certain things on your blog. As you can see from the screen be-
low, your blog can show: Your blogs pages, Recent Comments, Recent Posts, Links etc etc.
Choose what you would like to have, but make sure you definitely include the following: Meta
(this is VERY important, it shows up on your blog as “Log In” and “Site Admin”) and Links (this
allows you to have a “Blogroll” of links to other sites). Some themes just drag and drop the wid-
get from the LHS of the page to the Sidebar on the RHS. Others you have to click on the widget
and then follow the instructions. Some themes have more than one sidebar to put widgets on.
From the LHS to the Drag and
Drop the chosen widget from the
LHS to the Sidebar(s)

5. From the screen shot below, you can see which widgets we have chosen to use:
This blog has a
LHS Sidebar only
The Widgets chosen
show upas you can
see here:
Search Box
Calendar
Meta
Categories
Tags
Links
(Blogroll)
Archives
Check out how your blog looks now you have added the widgets.
You will see that some of the themes have a tab saying Custom Header This enables you to
add your own image as a header. That is what we did for Exploring the World of Web 2.0. Basi-
cally, you just upload an image and crop it. This then comes up as the header pic on your blog.

6. Ok lets look at posting something to your blog. Click on the Post tab and go to Add New to get
to the following screen:
This is the title of your post
In here write what you want to say……..
Don’t worry about this bit
Categories are like the chapter in a book.
Tags are like looking at the index to a book.
Tick the relevant box, or make up a new Cate-
For example if your post is about the rock
gory as required. If you were writing about the
group the Rolling Stones, your tags might be:
Rolling Stones, then you may have a Category
for :
Rolling Stones, rock, gig, songs, Mick Jagger
Rockbands
Now, if we go back and look at a Blog, we can see the Tags and Categories all show up on the
Sidebar
If you chose the Categories
Widget, all your Categories
will show up on the sidebar
The same for the Tags, you
will see a Tag Cloud if you
have chosen that widget.
Don’t forget, you can always go
back to Appearance and add more Widgets to your Sidebar(s) whenever you want to.

7. If, as part of your post, you want to add a Link to another blog or another website, this is how
you do it:
Click this tab to make sure you
have the HTML page showing.
Here is a post about “How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement” . The au-
thor wrote the title to the article in his post, then he highlighted the bit he wanted to make
into a hyperlink and clicked the blue Link tab , a box appears, cut and paste the URL for the site
into this box...hey presto you have added a hyperlink. Note: If you get a yellow information box
coming up about “scripted windows”, just click the box and temporarily allow the scripted win-
dows, then click the blue link box again and you should get the URL box appearing.
(It’s slightly different if you use Firefox, but not too much.)

8. If you want to add pics or other media, then click on the appropriate icon as shown below:
When you are adding an image, it is best to use the browser upload
Then you can choose the size of your picture and insert it into your post. It will come out as a long
string of HTML-speak. Be careful, Windows Explorer tends to put it at the start of your post. If you
have Firefox as a browser you will find it is better and puts the pics in the correct place in your
post. (If you are using Windows Explorer, you may have to cut and paste the HTML code into the
right place.)

9. As an example:
This is a picture of one of our library displays featured in “The WILD Library”.
If we look behind the scenes at the Dashboard we can see the HTML code that represents this
image.

10. The last thing we will look at is the Blogroll . This is where you can create a list of links to
other blogs or websites. It will appear on your sidebar, as long as you have chosen this wid-
get. To create a list of links in your Blogroll, click on the Links tab, and Add New
Within your Blogroll, you can create different Categories for your Links.
For example, “The WILD Library” has Link Categories like Good Blogs, Great Resources, For
Teachers, Monivae Blogs, Web 2.0 Resources, etc etc. Just add a New Category whenever you
want.
Add the name of the link here
Add the URL (web address) here
Add a brief Description

11. On your Dashboard, your list of Links looks like this:
URL for Link Link Categories
Name of Site you
are linking to
This is what the Blogroll of all your Links looks like when it comes up on your blog. The links arrange
themselves under the Link Categories that you have set up. Remember, for this to show up, you have to
choose the Links Widget when you are organising the Appearance of your blog.

12. Well, I think we have covered the basics of setting up
and running your blog.
There are lots of other great things you can do…..
but the best way to find out about them is to play….
so off you go
and have a lovely time blogging
(This is just the start...there is so much more!!!!)