Writing Articles

We all know that a blog is an online diary or journal, but what is a blog not? A blog is not a website. Blogs can be updated quickly and easily, and as in a conventional diary or log, entries are posted in chronological order, but they are read in reverse chronological order. This means that although a blog can accommodate your novel, it’s not an easy prospect because it is not what the blog was designed to do.

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A blog can be viewed as a magazine. If your diary was serialised in a magazine, and a reader bought the issue carrying episode 12, that reader would then have to track down the issues carrying the 11 previous entries.

[b]Getting Started[/b]
Let’s visit the blog and start with basics. First, set up a screen name and password, and then log in. Here you have two options: “Login” & “Login to Backoffice.” Backoffice is your admin area, so log in there and click “my profile.” Most of it is self-explanatory and it is only the first few boxes you are concerned with. The others are for admin use.

[b]Getting Personal[/b]
We’re now going to personalise your blog from the backoffice pages. First click the “blog settings” tab. The screen will change and you’ll find four tabs below the main menus.

Click the “general” tab. Here you can name your blog. “John Smith’s blog”, “My diary”, “The Dog’s Dinner”, or whatever you choose. Most of the rest of this page need not worry you, but there is an option to allow or disallow comments. Make your choice.

[b]The Colour of Your Skin[/b]
Now click “skin”. There are a number of display options available to you, some work better than others. The “nifty corners” skin, which you see when you first access the blogs, is for admin and help only, and not available to members, but you can pick any of the others.

[b]Display[/b]
Next click “display”. On this page, you will set up peripheral information. You can insert a tagline such as mine, which reads, “much of what you read here really happened”. On this page, you can also choose whether your blog will be listed publicly on the blog list and whether you want the bloglist on your pages. These options can be found at the bottom of the page under the heading “list of public blogs.” You should tick these if you want others to read your blog. The final option on this page is your linkblog. You can choose to show headers and teasers from any blog on the system, or none at all.

For now we are not going to worry about the advanced tab, so we are finished with settings. We’ll now click on “Categories” at the top of the page.

[b]Creating Categories[/b]
In here, you should set up the categories that divide your blog into logical sections. Mine are largely self-explanatory, and the busiest is “daft”, which probably tells you something about me.

Setting categories is easy. Your basic blog, which uses your screen name, is already set up, and beneath it is a green cross with the instruction, “sub-category here.” Create and name as many categories as you want. You will also note that you can create sub-categories within sub-categories, rather like creating folders in the file tree on “My Documents” in windows.

That completes the blog set up. Uploading photographs and establishing links is something we’ll look at later.

[b]Posting[/b]
Now let’s post to the blog. Click the “Write” tab and you will be presented with an edit screen. Across the top, you may find a series of boxes. These are blogs you can post to. They may include Linkblog and Help and your own blog. Linkblog is designed to carry links to other sites and help is there for queries.

Let’s imagine you are posting to your own blog, where you have a category named “diary”, where you want to put the post.

Click the tab for your blog. On the right you will see a box with all your categories listed. Click the “diary” box. This ensures that your post goes where you want it. If at any time, you post a piece to the wrong category, you can edit it and simply change the category. If, however, you post to the wrong blog, “help” or “linkblog” for example, you will have to delete it and repost in the correct blog.

You have one final decision before typing your piece. Will the post be public, private, draft or finished? These options are on the right and they are self-explanatory, with the possible exception of “deprecated”, which is applied to published posts that you may wish to remove from sight, but not delete altogether.

Now you can type your piece. My preference is to produce everything in Word and paste it in, but effects such as italics and bold do not transfer. Instead, along the top of the edit screen, you’ll find a range of options above the smilies. On blogs, italics, is “em” and bold is “str”. Simply mark the text you want to emphasise and click the appropriate button.

When posting, you do not want the whole of a single post taking up your front page, so you need to create a teaser. To do this, when writing or editing, click the “!M” button after your first or second paragraph. All that will show on your blog homepage is the teaser and a link to “read more” beneath it. That way your blog will display a number of pieces on the front page and not just the one, and that will tempt your readers to stay.

For an example of a blog front page,
http://www.writelink.co.uk/blog/blogs//index.php?blog=12

Now that your post is created, click “save” at the bottom of the edit screen and bingo … you’re a blogger!

[i]Editor’s note: This is an excellent tutorial to get you started with the Writelink blogs, but we are still refining some aspects of them so they are not yet open to the whole membership. However, if you would like to help with the testing please email me for the link:[/i] sue@writelink.co.uk