Start Your Own Blog on Edublogs

Making a Splash with Your First Post

Welcome to the Blogosphere!

 

This post is written to help you dive into your first blog post.
I will go over 3 ‘wave-makers’ that are useful to know about when adding some ‘splash’ to a post:
Hyperlinks

Images

Videos

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• I will also discuss Categories which is Edublog’s term for ‘Tags’.

• Before we get started, it is a good idea to click on Save and Continue Editing on a regular basis when writing a post. Sometimes you can lose a lot of work if you don’t make this a regular habit. After doing this, you can scroll down and see a preview of your post, below the Upload section.

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Hyperlinks:

Hyperlinks are very simple to add… and they are very important! Linking is what makes blogs different than journals; linking brings the text alive; linking creates dialogue, and encourages comments; and linking allows us to synthesize ideas and add new meaning to what we read, and write in the blogosphere.

I think there are three key elements to hyperlinks: 1) Hyperlinks empower readers with choice. We can’t follow every hyperlink and subsequent links within those links, so we end up choosing the ones we want to follow. This choice empowers us as readers to follow our interests rather than a single author’s contribution. 2) Hyperlinks empower writers with focus, we can hyperlink to background information and tangents instead of getting caught up in this information. We can link and get on with our point. 3) Hyperlinks make a blog what it is… a learning conversation.

Let’s get started with the link above this line as an example.

Steps:

1. Copy the URL (web address) that you want to link to. In this example: http://eduspaces.net/dtruss/weblog/151251.html
2. Highlight the word(s) in the post that you want to make into a link. In this example: ‘a learning conversation’
3. Paste the URL into the top Link URL window.
4. Choose ‘Open link in the same window’ or ‘Open link in a new window’, (I usually pick ‘new window’).
5. Give your link a Title. This is what you see when your mouse moves over the link.

Images:

Like the surfing photo? I got it from: ‘localsurfer’ (the only name on the site), http://www.localsurfer.co.uk, North Devon, UK. He has something called a Creative Commons Liscence asking for Attribution. That means you must attribute (give credit for) the work by the author/artist or licensor, if you want to use the photo.
I didn’t find this photo on Flickr – Creative Commons Search- which is a great place to find photos. I found this one at another site: yotophoto.

There are two ways to put a photo on your site:

1. You can click on the tree image and use the Image URL from an image already online. How do you find this? Right click on an image and select “Copy Image Location“… then paste this into the Image URL section. (Mac users, press ‘control’ (ctrl) and then click the on the image to copy the location.)

This example image shows both #1 and #2, you would only do one at a time.

2. You can Upload a file, (just like you do for e-mail). Once the image is uploaded you can choose a Thumbnail or Full sized image. Then just drag-and-drop it to the location you would like, or click Send to Editor if your cursor is in the location that you want the image.

Notice in the example above how I moved the surfer image to the right side of the page using the Alignment option in the ‘insert/edit image’ pop-up box. You can do this with an uploaded file too. Next to the Upload tab, you can see a Browse tab- this will show you your previously uploaded images.

Just click on the image you want to move, then click on the Tree image tab. The window, as seen above, will pop up and you can change the alignment. You can change the image size too, but I recommend just clicking on the image you want to change and resizing it as you would in a word document by clicking and holding on one of the image corners and sliding the image bigger or smaller in a diagonal motion.

If you want to put your own pictures into your blog, then I suggest getting an account with flickr or with Bubbleshare. I upload pictures as Copyrighted () and then make the ones that are not of my family, that I don’t mind sharing, Share-Alike ().

[note: It took a while to get the 'images' section of this post done. During this time I clicked on Save and Continue Editing at least 5 times, probably more.]

 

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Videos

These are really easy since both the Youtube and the Google Video pop-up windows show you examples of what they want you to paste in to them. In the image on the left, I highlighted the code for the very interesting web2.o video seen below. This video is called The Machine is Us/ing Us by Professor Wesch of Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University.

When you add the video you will see the code and not the actual video. To check and see if you did things right, click Save and Continue Editing, then you can scroll down and see a preview of your post, below the Upload section.

 

For Google Video there are a couple extra steps.

First you have to click on the blue button shown. Then the ‘Embed HTML‘ link will appear- Click on this, then highlight the code. Note: for Google videos you must copy the whole link, but you only need the long string of numbers after an = sign. So you need to paste the whole link somewhere besides the video pop-up window, then select and copy just the number. When you have just the number, then you can paste it into the pop-up window.

This video, The Treadmill Dance, is fun!

 

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Something handy to know before publishing your post:

Tags: Should I tag or should I go?

‘Tagging‘ your post with with keywords (known as Categories on Edublogs) can make finding posts very easy later on. You can set up your blog so that your categories are seen in the side bar. To show you how to add categories to a post, I added ‘edublogs’, ‘hyperlinks’, ‘images’, and ‘video’ to my Categories. Also, in the image on the right, I was just about to add ‘first post’ to my categories as well. As seen, I unclicked ‘Uncategorized’ -the default category. There is no right way to use categories, play with them and figure out what works best for you. You can change/add/delete a category at any time…go to Dashboard -> Manage -> Categories.

After publishing this, I will go to the Manage tab on my Dashboard and erase the original post that comes with the blog. Another option you have would be to go to the Manage tab and edit the original post.

So now you are ready to categorize (tag) your first post, and you have the know-how to fill your posts with hyperlinks, images and videos.

Here is a link to go back to the Start Your Own Blog wiki.

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