Help & Advice

Whether you are an accomplished blogger or a complete newbie, you’ll find this tutorial will help get your Writelink blog up and running in next to no time!

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We suggest you print it off and keep it by you, at least for the first few sessions you spend on the blogs and if you do nothing else, please read the following article by David Robinson, who shares the benefit of his blogging expertise in …

WELCOME TO THE BLOGOSPHERE!
Getting Started
First, set up a Username 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.

Getting Personal
We’re now going to personalise your blog from the backoffice pages.

When you login to your Backoffice, you will see a form which will allow you to submit posts. Just above this you should see a row of blogs that you are allowed to post too.

Make sure that the name of your personal blog is selected as you will have permission to write to several different blogs, but only permission to alter settings on your Personal Blog.

Look for the “Blog Settings” tab. The screen will change and you’ll find four tabs below the main menus.

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. You can set this to “Published,” which means anyone making comments on your work will see them live on the site immediately or you can set to “Draft,” which you can then decide whether to publish or not. Make your choice.
One other setting that is important is the Trackback option. You can either allow or disallow them. If you allow them you will almost certainly get hordes of spam messages. We advice you to disallow.

Skin Tab.
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. You can also decide whether to allow viewers who visit your blog to change the skin or not.

Display Tab
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.

Don’t worry about making wrong choices, you can go back and alter these settings whenever you like.

Advanced Tab
You can ignore these settings for the time being, but as some deal with the way your blog is found by search engines you may want to fill in some of the fields.

Media Library – do not alter anything here!

After Each New Post – checking these boxes will let these Ping sites know that your blog has been updated. Again, good for search engine recognition.
Meta Data – Another method of helping your blog get trawled by the search engines. Include as many keywords as you can that relate to you and your blog.

Categories
The tab that controls these is in the Backoffice and third in from the left. 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.

Posting
Now let’s post to the blog. Remember, you must be in the correct blog for your post! You can check that you are by noting whether the right blog is highlighted!

Assuming you are in the correct 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. Check again that the blog you want to write to is highlighted.

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. A more detailed explanation of publishing status is included later in this file.

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 highlight 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/blogs/DW

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

UPLOADING YOUR AVATAR
An avatar is simply a small photograph or other graphic. The Writelink blogs allow you to upload a small avatar and a large avatar. Follow these instructions to add avatars to your posts.

1. Log in to the back office and go to the 'My Profile' tab.

2. You will see an Avatars section where large and small image
files can be added.

3. You may see boxes which will allow you to browse to your computer for the desired images or you may see a message saying, “Upload and Edit my Avatars.” If the later, check the box and click save.

4. Avatars need to be set to the correct size to display properly. These should be 48 x 48 pixels for the small version and up to 400 x 400 for the large version. Follow these steps to create your Avatars.

PREPARING AN AVATAR
1. Select a good, clear .jpg or gif image.
2. Open it in a photo editing programme such as Photoshop.
3. Go to Image/image size and set the resolution to 72 dpi and the width and height to 48 x 48 pixels for the small avatar and up to 400 x 400 pixels for the large avatar.

If you run into difficulties then please send it to me and I will do it for you! sue@writelink.co.uk

MORE ABOUT POSTS
Star Rating
When you create your posts you will see that there is an option to either allow or disallow star ratings on your posts. Allowing other members to rate your post will allow the site to add it to its statistics so for instance, your post may appear as a top rated post in a blog side bar. This is one way of getting more people to read your posts, but the choice is yours!

Sharing Your Posts With Other Members
When you join the Writelink Blogs you will find that they are made up of PUBLIC BLOGS that relate to Writelink activities and PERSONAL BLOGS.

The Personal Blogs all belong to individual members, including you! You can usually tell a personal blog as it will probably include the owner’s name. Further more, the PUBLIC BLOGS will all carry the Writelink green livery and logo.

The software allows you to have a great deal of control over how YOUR PERSONAL blog looks including who sees or doesn’t see your posts.

The PUBLIC BLOGS have had certain restrictions applied to them so apart from posting and commenting, depending upon your membership status, you cannot do very much else on them so let's forgot those for the moment!

This help note deals with your PERSONAL BLOG.

When you create a post in any of the Writelink blogs you will see down the right hand side under Visibility/Sharing several options which will allow you to decide who can or can’t see your posts.

PUBLISHED – If this is selected your post will appear to anyone, including unregistered users. You should use this if you are looking for publicity for either your work or services as individual blogs will be picked up by the search engines.

PROTECTED – If this is selected your post will only appear to users who are members of your blog. NB. Your blog will still appear in search engine results, just not any Protected posts.

When your PERSONAL Blog is created there are no members of it other than yourself. This means that if you selected Protected, no-one will see your posts!

To avoid a flood of queries all PERSONAL blogs have now been automatically setup to include Writelink Writer members as members of your PERSONAL blog. This means other Writer members will be able to view your protected posts.

If you don’t want this to happen, but would prefer to manually choose who sees your protected posts then send an email to: sue@writelink.co.uk and I will remove the group permission and add the desired individual members for you.

This obviously isn’t a very satisfactory state of affairs as this is something all PERSONAL blog owners need to be able to do for themselves. The good news is, the blogging software we are using is going to be upgraded shortly to allow this feature.

Don’t forget, you can have the best of both worlds! You can decide on a post basis what you would like the general public to see and what you would prefer only members or certain members to view.

PRIVATE – Exactly what it says on the tin! Only you and the site Administrator can view posts with this setting. If you are using your blog as an independent backup of your work then use this setting.

DRAFT – If this is selected your post will not be viewable on the public pages, but will be viewable to other members of your blog via their Back Office. You should only use this for posts on the Writelink PUBLIC blogs, not your PERSONAL blog.

When posting to your own Blog or another PERSONAL blog that you have permission to post to and are still working on the post, select Private. When you are ready to publish, use the Edit button under the post and change the status.

DEPRECATE – If you select this, your post remains on the site, but only viewable through your back office.

SUBSCRIBE – You will find this link under Manage My Account or Misc depending on which site skin is being used. If you click this link it will allow you to be notified when new posts are made to the blog you have subscribed to.

You may not necessarily be able to read the posts as this will depend whether you have been made a member of that particular blog!

USING THE “FRIENDS” FEATURE

The Friends feature is probably the single most powerful tool yet installed on the blogs.

WHAT IT DOES
It will allow you to create a mini-community of virtual friends from within the Writelink community and also, add non-Writelink members by invitation.

HOW IT WORKS
1. On all posts, next to the author's name this link appears: (add to friends)
2. Click this and you may see a message saying, “An email has been sent to the author to accept your request.” (This isn’t currently working for all blogs, but don’t worry the Friends request is being processed even though there may be no acknowledgement.
3. The prospective friend will receive an email containing a link and a message. If he/she wishes to become your friend then they are told to click the link. If they don’t, they are told to ignore the email.
4. When the friend request is agreed to, both parties become subscribed to each others blogs.

HOW DO I MANAGE MY FRIENDS?
1. Ensure you are logged into the blog site.
2. Go to your back office of Admin area.
3. Look for the Friends tab at the top of the page.
4. Click this and you will see a list of friends including their avatars/photos.
5. You will also see a Reject button. You can use this to remove someone from your list if you so wish.

HOW DO I INVITE NON-WRITELINK FRIENDS?
At the moment you cannot do this from your Admin. This is the second stage of the feature that is currently being developed. It should be available within the next week.

I DON’T SEE THE add to friends LINK ON MY BLOG?
Some blog skins have not had the code applied to them yet. This will be done over the next few days. The skins still awaiting the code are:

basic, blue_sky, city_in_evo, classic, clean, crystal_glass, darkfire, l33t_gray, London, natural_pink, nautical_2lg, originalb2, tic_tac, wpc_default.

If you are using one of these skins you can switch to one of the others that have had the feature installed or leave things as they are.

OTHER MEMBERS WILL STILL BE ABLE TO ADD YOU TO THEIR FRIENDS LIST IF ANY OF YOUR POSTS APPEAR ON ONE OF THE SITE BLOGS! E.G. BLOGALL. Look for the Add to Friends link beside the author’s name.

IF YOU NEED HELP!
We appreciate that for many, blogging is a very new concept and the amount of control you have over your own blog is probably something that is quite new to you and perhaps a little confusing.

If you need help please follow these guidelines before asking for direct help from individuals which ties up valuable writing time.

1. Read through this help file! Most of the common issues are addressed here!

2. Consult the Help Blog. Members experiencing difficulties post here so the chances are your query will all ready have been answered. Also make sure that you subscribe to it so that you are made aware of when new posts are added.

3. If your query is not answered by consulting the above, POST it in the Help blog as a new post. New posts are usually responded to within 24 hours. The more Help blog is used, the more useful it becomes for newer members.

WHAT YOU MUST NOT DO!
1. Do not email our site programmer! He is paid to develop the site, not spend time answering user queries.

2. Do not email individual members with queries unless they offer to help off site!

WHAT IF MY CHANGED SETTINGS DO NOT WORK?
The site is very robust so if you make changes and they don’t appear to have taken effect or you get error messages, it could be your computer is caching out dated pages. Do the following:

1. Go to the affected page.
2. Click the Refresh button at the top of your web browser. (Curved arrow – Firefox, opposite circling arrows – IE).

You may need to repeat whilst holding down the Ctrl button at the same time. Usually this forces a new page to be loaded from the web and not your computer cache and should solve the problem.

BROWSER PROBLEMS
We strongly suggest you use Firefox to browse the blogs although many members prefer Internet Explorer or AOL. All areas should display properly, although we do have the occasional report of errors with AOL.

Incidently, Firefox should always be the preferred choice for web browsing as it is much more secure than other browsers!

If you don’t have Firefox all ready installed get it from here:
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/firefox/