Academic Productivity

In this post I’ll show you two easy ways to submit a post. Note: if you have blogged before, this explanation may be unnecessary.

First method: use the built-in editor on our site

I’ll assume that you could sign in/log in just fine. Then you should see a blue WordPress page with several options. One of them says “write”. Yo can click on it, and by default it will take you to an edit box. You can start typing away. Make sure you are on tab “write post” and not “write page”.

 

As you see, the obvious WYSIWYG icons for formatting text are there. The only one you might not recognize is the one in between the picture and spell-check: that is the post splitter. For long posts, you may want to insert a splitter so people get the “continue reading this post” message. Like what you should see about here

You may want to include an image in your post (in fact, post with images are more memorable and easier to find).

For that you need to upload the file with the image. Go to the bottom of the page and click the choose button on the file box. select where in your HD the image is. Give it a title, and submit.

Then, the image will be in the browser. Click the ‘browse’ button, and you will see your image. clicking on it will give you the option to send it to the editor. Just press ‘send to editor’.

Note that if you just click the image icon; you will see a dialog like this:                                                            

This is not what you want, because it would include a link to an external image; this could change any time (you have no control) and is thus risky: you want to use only images you uploaded.

Finally, a post needs categories. Just pick a few from the list on the right. 

Second method: use windows live Writer

There are some editors that help you compose posts on your desktop instead of using a browser. Here I’m going to use Windows Live Writer (WLW) because it’s the most common. Once the blog is set up, it’s as easy as using word, and you get the exact formatting that the blog will have once posted (it downloads the CSS file from the server and uses it to render what you type).

Here are the steps to configure WLW:

1. Click on weblog > add weblog account
2. Select another blog service
3. For url use academicproductivity.com
4. and type your username , password.
5. Click next. It will take a while… detecting blog settings…
6. Click finish

To insert images, do not use copy/paste. Save the image to your HD. Then drag and drop the image from your HD to the white space (like you’d do in word). Then click it. You’ll see that the right column becomes  image-centered. Tell it to right-align picture, and add some margins (10 points each) for better positioning.

After you are done with your post (and checked you have no misspellings) you simply press ‘publish’. It will take a while because WLW is notifying other blogs of what you are posting (if you link to them, you will generate trackbacks, etc). It also notifies sites such as technorati that you have posted something new and tells them how to list you.

Don’t worry if it takes several seconds before you see any response from the server.

What happens after I post? Where’s my post?

You cannot see your post immediately after you posted it (bummer ). The post enters a moderation queue, and it goes live only after one of the moderators sees it and approves it. I’m sure you understand why we do this; it’s not to kill the joy of seeing your post published immediately.

Hopefully if you want to post here, you can do it with any of these two methods. If some steps are not clear, google for them and if you can find nothing post your question here.

Enjoy the new functionality.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Announcements, Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.