How to Use Your Blog
The WordPress interface is very easy to use. Once you login to your blog, you will notice an interface that has some similarities to a word process (bold, italics) as well as some features new to you (blogroll, presentation).
How to Use WordPress Blogs
Basic Help
Because this system is based on WodPress, we’ll send you to the experts for some basic instruction. Other help, we’ve written for you. Here are some links to the WordPress help pages.
- Writing posts. To put information on your blog, you need to post.
- Categories. You can organize posts and pages.
- Creating Pages. Pages are stand alone pages that appear in your sidebar.
- Blogroll. This is where your links to other sites go. Under Blogroll, delete the pre-set links that your blog came with. Use Add Link to add links for sites you want to link to.
How to Customize Your Own Site
You can personalize your site by choosing from the pre-installed themes. New themes are added often. Here are some basic instructions for choosing and altering a theme:
- After you login to your weblog, go to Presentation
- Choose “Jason’s Customciser”
- If you want to change the header image, type in the URL (web address) of the image you want to use
- If you want to change the colors of your font, header, etc, use a color
chart to change the
numerical values of the colors. - If you want an entirely new theme, go to Themes and choose a new one.
Because this is a multi-user system, customization is not perfect; security issues prevent total customization. Currently, the template that allows for the most customization is K9. If you discover other templates that are customizable or want a template added, contact Dr. Jeff Rice.
For InstructorsRegistering Students as Users Get the students to register at the main site: comp.missouri.edu/blogs.
Then they should be in the database. They don’t have to make a blog when they register; there is an option to just make an account.
After that, you should be able to add them.
Go to Users (top row of the interface)
On the bottom:
Add user from community
Put in their email. Decide their role. Author lets users publish. Contributor lets people edit.
How to Embed a YouTube Video
- Find the video you want on YouTube
- Look at the URL for the video (the web address)
- Copy the part that comes after the = sign
- In the body of your post, write [youtube thepartyoucopied]
- I.e include the brackets in what you copy
- Your video should show up
Known Bugs
- If you already have a blog, and you try and make another blog, you may see a blank page after you complete the process for making a new blog. Your blog was made; you can go to its url. Plugin interference may be causing this blank page to show up.
- Sometimes, you create a blog and you don’t receive an email confirmation. Go to where your blog should be and see if it was created anyway.
