Pearls & Onions » Blogging How-To

Tweaking Your Navigation

lisahuff — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:49:20 +0000

Many of you are becoming expert bloggers: writing interesting, thought-provoking posts, including links to relevant sites, embedding pictures or videos relating to your posts, incorporating original graphics that enhance the look and readability of your site, eliciting comments from peers and unknowns. As we continue to hone our blogging skills, we need to consider our sidebars and the navigation of our blogs.

How easily a reader is able to navigate your blog is extremely important. Just as you carefully consider how best to arrange your ideas in a piece of writing, you must also consider carefully how to arrange your ideas on your blog. As your blogs grow, navigation becomes especially important.

Basically, you can create two formats for your ideas:

posts arranged in categories and listed in chronological order (usually)

pages arranged in whatever heirarchy you create.

How does a reader navigate a blog?

He can view posts created in particular categories by selecting a category and viewing all the posts created in that particular category;

He can view pages created by clicking a page link shown in the header or sidebar of your blog.

What if your template is not displaying categories or pages?

You may need to tweak your settings to improve the navigation of your site. To do so, follow these steps:

In the administrative panel, select Presentation.

From the subcommands (bottom row of toolbar), select Widgets.

If your template uses a sidebar, you’ll see it displayed. If you scroll down the page, you’ll see all the “Widgets” you can add to your sidebar. To display pages in your sidebar, simply click and drag (while holding down the left-click mouse button) the pages widget onto the sidebar. Do the same for the categories widget. Then click update or save (whichever displays).

These simple changes should allow your reader to navigate your site via categories or pages. As we add new categories and begin creating several pages for your portfolio, you’ll see how important it is to be able to navigate the myriad of ideas and information on your site.

You might also consider playing with some of the other available widgets. Don’t get too carried away, however. Remember, the goal is to make your site user-friendly, not to overwhelm your readers with a sleugh of trivial widgets!

Feed Your Reader

lisahuff — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:07:03 +0000

Part of your daily ritual should now be sitting down to your computer, signing in to iGoogle, skimming through your Google Reader widget, checking out what new content your peers and your teacher have added to their blogs. Some of us have encountered a problem, however, in being able to subscribe to both POSTS and COMMENTS. I think–with some help from Clare–we may have solved the problem.

If you copy and paste the URL of a friend’s blog into the “Add Subscription” box of your Google Reader, you will subscribe to new posts your friend writes, much like you might subscribe to Newsweek to have it delivered to your mailbox (Google Reader being your mailbox in this analogy!). However, if someone comments on one of your friend’s posts, you won’t see the comments in your Google Reader. This poses a serious problem because we all want to be a part of the discussion. Having others hear our voices and listening to the voices of others is a huge reason we blog. We are creating a community of intelligent voices, each questioning, connecting, theorizing about our world.

The solution: for each blog, you should subscribe to TWO different feeds.

first, copy and paste the blog URL into your Reader;

second, copy and paste the URL into your Reader, adding [/comments/feed] to the end of the address. For example, the feed for comments from this blog would be: [http://blogtest.edublogs.org/comments/feed]. You, of course, will omit the brackets [].

Like you, I am a lifelong learner. I don’t have all the answers, but I know how to ask the right questions and seek in the right places and test my theories to discover, or sometimes invent answers/solutions–that is, I know how to problem-solve. I’m not certain adding two subscriptions for each blog is the best solution, but for now we’ll try it until we discover a better solution. I’m researching feedburner, a site that allows you to create feeds to webpages (blogs, wikis, pages…) you create. Why would you do this? If you REALLY want others–many others–to hear your voice, you have to get your voice out, like advertisers market their products. Syndicating (Providing easy access to your feeds for others to subscribe to) your pages helps you create a readership, thus broadening our circle of intelligent voices.

I still have questions that need answers. When someone creates a PAGE (as opposed to a post or comment), will the blog send a feed to my Reader? Can I combine two feeds (posts + comments) to create one feed that will allow my readers, with one simple click, to subscribe to all new material posted on my blog?

One final word, adding [comments/feeds] to the end of a URL is unique (I think) to WordPress, the software that powers our blogs. If you were to subscribe to a blog (or any web page) not using WordPress, I don’t think adding the string at the end of the URL will work.

To conclude, RSS and Readers are only tools. Let’s not forget tools are created to make our tasks easier. At first, all this digital business may seem a bit messy. You might be tempted to declare “doing things the old way” is easier. I challenge you, however, to give yourself a chance to learn to use the tools, to learn how powerful they can be. We are only beginning to understand what these tools can enable us to do. After all, I bet someone once thought picking cotton by hand was easier, better than using a complex, frightening, seemingly cumbersome machine.

Tease Your Readers

lisahuff — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:56:51 +0000

Have you noticed how long posts clutter your blog pages, making them not-so-pretty to look at and not-so-easy to navigate? Your reader has to scroll, and scroll, and scroll to view all your posts.

To solve this problem, many authors create teasers. That is, they start with an interesting lead to grab the reader’s attention and introduce the topic, and then they insert a “Read More” link so that readers click the link to read the rest of the post. Why should you do this? Inserting a teaser shortens the length of each post, making your page much more visually appealing. Using the teaser is a basic tool of those delivering online content. The screenshot above shows how USA Today uses teasers to make their front page easier on the eye and more user-friendly. Note how the right side of the page displays titles for stories with a short teaser. To read more, you simply click the title.

How do you create a teaser on your blog? You simply type a short HTML command inside your post where you want the text to end and the “Read More” to appear. You won’t see the results until you publish the blog.

–OR– you can use the tool in the toolbar ( to split your post

Start teasing your readers!

Add Some Bling with Images

lisahuff — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:21:25 +0000

You may have noticed several of your peers are adding images to posts and pages: some are creating graphics that complement a particular post or page, like Jay’s customized header for her blog or JM’s graphics to draw attention to his ideas.

Using images is a great way to add bling to your blog. Before I explain how to add an image, you should keep in mind some blogging best practices:

Be sure the picture/graphic complements the content; don’t fall into the trap of adding meaningless, random images that don’t relate to the content.

Don’t overdo it; a well-placed graphic can enhance your ideas, but too many graphics can clutter the page.

Don’t use pictures from the Internet with properly citing them. You MUST cite pictures as you would text. This means you should include a link to the original source of the picture, and include the source information of the picture in MLA format. The best way to do so–without cluttering your post, is to include a list of sources at the end of the post.

You might want to try creating your own graphics. Simply use PowerPoint to create a graphic (that’s what JM used in the example above). Then, take a screenshot of it when you’re finished (hit the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard–in the upper rand-hand corner). Paste the screen shot on a new slide. Then, right-click on the image and save it.

The easiest way to publish these images in your blog is to upload them to an online photo storage service. Check out PhotoBucket or Flickr ; both are free services. You simply create an account and start uploading your images. Once the image is online, you’ll be able to copy the URL of the picture (usually by right-clicking on the photo, scrolling down to “Properties” and then copying the address (URL).

When creating a post or page in your blog, you simply hit the “img” tool (for image). It will pop up a box for you to paste the URL. It will add this complicated looking code to your post, which may look a bit like a foreign language, but when you publish your post, your image will appear.

Try it out–see if you can add some bling to your next post. A picture truly is worth a thousand words. And, it’s fun!