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 American Technology and Culture Class 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.

Establishing Page Order

You can control the order that both pages and subpages show up in the site. This is simply done by going to the fields below the text box while creating (or editing) a page and finding the Page Order field. From here, all you need to do is place a number in this field between 0 and 100 (though that number could go higher). The logic for order is that the lower the number the higher the page stands in the order. In other words, a page numbered as 1 would be higher on a vertical list of pages than a page number 2 or 3, and would be further to the left on a horizontal list of pages. Make sense?

Nesting Pages

To create a page as a subpage of another (which is often referred to as the parent/child relationship) you create a page as you normally would, and simple scroll down to the fields below the text box and look for the Page Parent field. Then select the title of the parent page you would like this one to be a sub-page (or child) of.

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 780px, and no greater in height than 185px. 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.