Blog Instructions

CREATING POSTS

This page has some instructions/suggestions for creating posts (for participants on the trip).

Getting started

After you log into the blog, you can add a new post by clicking on “+New” and choosing“Post” at the top of the page or by clicking on “Posts” and “Add New” from the dashboard on the left.  Then

  1. Give your post a good (but relatively) short title.
  2. Start writing.
  3. Insert a “more tag” after a few sentences or a short paragraph to indicate how much appears on the front page of the blog.
  4. Consider adding a phototo your post.
  5. Add a few tagsto your post and check that it has the correct category.
  6. When you are finished, click the “Update”

More details below.

To be continued… the more tag

If your post is longer than a paragraph, insert a “more tag” somewhere early on — after the first paragraph, perhaps.  Think of everything above this as a teaser for your longer post.

The “more tag” icon is two rectangles separated by a dashed line.  (It’s third from right in top row of formatting options in my view.)

For the really creative among you, you can instead create a custom teaser for your post by filling in the “excerpt” box at the bottom of the post creation page.

Putting photos into your post

If you have photos to add, select the “Add Media” button found just below the title line.  When it opens the library page, you can then drag and drop photos from your camera and then add captions to each photo as desired.  Next, choose “Create Gallery” from the left panel.  You can then select the photos to add to the gallery and then select the “Create a New Gallery” button on the bottom right.  Then, insert the gallery into the page.

  • If you use a full-sized horizontal photo, choose to center it.  Don’t manually enter a bunch of returns to get things lined up since the amount of space things take will depend on the device used for viewing
  • You can choose to wrap text around the photo.
  • You can resize the photo (This is a good idea if you use a horizontal photo and wrap text since the posts aren’t very wide.
  • You can add a caption, although this may not be necessary if the photo is directly related to the post text nearby.

You can drag and the photo around to change its location within the post.

Tags

WordPress allows you to add tags to your posts.  This will make it easier for people to relocate them later.  The tags information is located toward the bottom of the right hand options column.  You can turn on a list of previously used tags and select from those.  If you don’t find one that suits your post, create your own.

Readers can select to view all posts by category or tag.

Publishing

Posts are not visible until they are published.  If you get interrupted and want to save your work without publishing, simply change the status to “draft” and update the post.  (The status section is near the top of the righthand control side bar.)

Comments

People can comment on your posts.  I don’t know how many of these we will get, but you might like to revisit your post after a day or two to see if there are any comments.

Author name

The author of each post is indicated using your wordpress nickname.   You can change this if you click on the “profile” link after logging in.