Exhibit Blog How-to

American Technology and Culture Website

Creating your Project Site

First thing you need to do is go and create your project site if you haven't already. You can following the directions for creating a new blog is you already have one on UMW Blogs here.

When creating your project blog, you may want to consider putting the name of your technology as the sub-domain name of your blog. For example, if your research project focuses on the ENIAC computer, you would probably want to make the sub-domain name eniac, which would look like this: http://eniac.umwblogs.org

Also, for a general overview of using UMW Blogs be sure to check out the support material here.

The Project Theme

After you create your project blog, you will want to go into the administrative backend to the the Design tab. From there, change the theme of your blog. The new theme you will be asked to use is called History of Technology 1.0 theme. Just click on it and then click on the "activate" link/button in the upper right-hand corner.

Static Homepage

The next thing you'll want to do is create a static homepage for your project site. This is a two-step process. First, create a new page (not a post!) and use the name of the technology you will be researching as the page title. To use the example from above, the homepage for the ENIAC site will be titled ENIAC.

Once you have publishing this new page, you will go to the Settings --> Reading subtab and select the radio button "Front page displays option: static page" then use the drop down menu to select the title page you just created.

Write Pages, Not Posts

The project site you create for your technology will consist entirely of pages, not posts. Keep this in mind as you begin to build your project site.

The difference between a page and a post is an important terminological/conceptual distinction to grasp, as posts and pages serve radically different functions. A post is an article that shows up within the chronology of your blog, the most recent always at the top---a good example is how professor McClurken is using the frontpage of your course blog.

A page is a more static space that is not part of the chronological logic of the blog of the blog. A page sits outside of this inverted time line, and often features more static content like the various parts of your research project. These will not be updated regularly after you publish them, and given a blog depends on frequency and time relevance---the entire site is far better suited for pages, not posts.

Custom Menu Tutorials

UMW Blogs recently upgraded to WordPress 3.0, which adds custom menus as a new feature for many templates. In this tutorial I will be discussing how to use the custom menus along with a short description on how custom menus can aid you in more clearly organizing your blog course.

The custom menus can be activated by going into the backend of your blog. Are example blog for the tutorial is http://fail.umwblogs.org. In your main menu, you will see an option for custom menus, go ahead and click that which will take you to another page:

At this point we can create a custom menu which will make use of any user-crated categories. Another excellent addition is the use of other websites URLs as a menu option. After we click save on the main screen, we can then select our newly created menu.

Refresh your page and you now have slick tabs along your header.

If you are not interested in having tabs in your header, you can turn off your custom menu and move towards the widgets (under appearance) option. From there, simply activate the custom menus option and drag it to where you want it on your page. You can now see that the menus are no longer in the header, but in our sidebar. 1: Moving to the widgets option 2: Selecting the custom menu widget 3: Revisit your page to see your new sidebar menu!

Custom Header Image

Finally, you can have a customized header for your own project blog, but you need to makes sure it is no wider than 940px, and no greater in height than 200px. A couple of free and simple tools for re-sizing and cropping images online are Picnik and Photoshop Express.

To upload an image, just go to the Design --> Custom Header Image subtab and use the Browse tab to find the image for your header.

Additionally, be sure to the background color is set to the hexidecimal number: #000000 (or black).

Contact

If you have problems with setting up your site; arranging and styling your pages; or any of these directions---please feel free to contact us for some help.