Hey guys, Brandon here from Techno Buffalo. In this video, I’m going to show you how to make new posts on your tech blog. Your tech blog is a great way to get involved with writing about technology and to get a new level of exposure that you wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. We will be featuring the best blogs on a regular basis on the main Techno Buffalo site.
In addition, your blog will be listed in the blogs index and when you make new posts, it will show up in the reset community blog post side bar item on the front page that you find down in this area.
Our blogging platform uses WordPress though we’ve made some customizations to the way that posts are made. We’ll go through that now and then in the next video, we’ll talk about how to customize the look and fill of your blog. So to start, right now I’m working on the TechnoBuffalo.com/Brandon blog. Right now, as you can see it’s totally blank, I haven’t changed the logo, I haven’t edited my own Ad code and I haven’t changed the layout.
To start, let’s talk about making a post. Once logged in, go up to my blogs, click on the name of your blog and go to new post. So to start, let’s make a post about the Zune HD. I’m going to call it my thoughts on the Zune HD, perfect. Now, I’m going to add some text to the text box and I’m going to just take some text from Amazon. Obviously, you’re going to want to use your own text and I’m just going to paste it a few times just so we have some text to work with.
Now on WordPress, since it’s mostly Ajax space, you can actually take this little corner and drag it down and get a larger window to work with. I recommend that you do that. In addition, you’re going to want to check off this button here that show the kitchen sink that will add more buttons and more choices that you can use to customize your text.
So, let’s add some images to this post. Obviously having images, having great images spaced well really encourages people to read and so that’s what we want so I’m going to click this button here that says Add Media and I’m going to click Select Files and I’m going to pick one of this pictures of the Zune so let’s say this one, that looks good.
So, it’s crunching uploading, it takes about a second. I’m going to scroll down and click Insert into Post. Now by default, it’s kind of loading in free space. Actually, when I have the text wrapped around the Zune picture sort of like a magazine, so I’m going to click on the picture then click on this little button here, it says Edit Image and I’m going to have it aligned left. I’m going to zoom out a little bit with this little preview window and then you get a little bit of a look on how it’s going to look and that’s exactly how I wanted to look
So, I’m going to go down to update and you see how it appears. Now, I’m going to publish it so I can go to my site and see how it looks. So, I’m going to click Publish, great and it says view post so I’m going to control click that, open it in a new window just so I know how it looks, looks pretty good, looks just like it does in the editor. I’m going to go back to my homepage.
Now, I want to add more text to this but I don’t want it to stay on the front page. I don’t want lots and lots of text to be on the front page so that it looks very clean. So, I’m going to add a break so that people can click on if they want to read more. Now to that, I’m going to grab some more text and I’m going to click over the html tab and I’m going to press the More button here, go back to the visual, see we have a break that says more, that’s where people will have to click on to get more content and I’m going to paste some more text, let’s add another image.
Same procedure as before, select Files. This time I’m going to go with this one here. And right off the bat, I want to tell it that I want it to the right this time, perfect. Now small problem with this image, I want a little bit of a buffer between the text and the image. So, I’m going to click on the image again and go to the image properties and go to Advanced Settings this time. I want to change the horizontal space to two and watch up here, you’re actually going to see a preview of what I’m actually changing. That didn’t look too good, let’s do four. Perfect.
I’m going to click Update and now I have a little bit of a buffer between the text and the picture. Now, let’s update the post and preview it on the site. So, I’m going to refresh. Now, I should have read more link and there it is, continue reading by press Continue Reading. I’m taking to the next page where I see the next image and the rest of the content that I have there, perfect.
So obviously, when you make your poss, in order to make them more discoverable and more organize, you’re going to want to use tags and categories. Categories are kind of just like they sound they’re categories, they’re broad categories so I’m going to add a new category here and let’s call it desktops.
Obviously, this post is in about the desktop but if it was I would check it off, this is about an MP3 player, tags or more granular category so I’m going to do Zune as a tag, Microsoft does a tag. In future videos, we’ll tell you how to filter your content by tags to help people find specific pieces of content that you’ve written. So, as far as I’m concerned, this post is pretty much done, I’m going to hit Update Post one more time, although you can post date it. If you want it to post tomorrow morning or next week or in a month from now, you can just change the date here and it won’t hit your front page until the specified date. So, I’m going to click Update Post just to have it go right now.
And finally, WordPress makes it easy to manage all of the content that you’ve posted. Over here on posts, I can click on Edit. I see a listing of all the posts that I have made, Now, there are ways without going into the post to change things, it’s called Quick Edit. When you hover your mouse over any title, you get a Quick Edit box, you click on that you can change the category, change when it posts even change the title without actually having to go into the post which is great because it saves you time but if you do want to go into the post and edit it, obviously you go and hit Edit. If you want to delete it, you delete it, view, do a control click and it will open up in a new tab so you can preview what you are going to post.
You can also change the view of the edit post screen in the upper right corner here, so we get a more elaborate view or we can have the simple view over here on the left which I think is a little faster loading and easier on the eyes. So, that was a quick look at how to add and manage content on your sub-blog on Techno Buffalo.
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