Please add suggestions in comments … Forgotten, EverNote, Diigo, Delicious…

Pre-Orientation Survey

• 41 folks have participated; please take a moment to complete if you have not done so
• Aggregated results will be shared with faculty and cohort
• Twitter handles (34 of 41!) will be used to set up cohort Twitter list
• WP links will be shared with students, faculty

MCDM Toolkit

WordPress Workshop

• Step-by-step for new accounts
• Configuration settings for all
• Identity
  • My Public WP Profile – edit information is displayed publicly on the Gravatar account (kegill). Your Gravatar is a form of persistent identity across websites, primarily those using blogging software (comments).
  • Google Profile: Your profile is the way you present yourself on Google products and across the web as sites incorporate Google profiles
  • Twitter: another login option, many classes integrate Twitter into course pedagogy

TypeWith.Me Doc with urls

• http://typewith.me/isgIS0j4lU

Twitter handles & Twitter List

Downloads

• Toolkit PPT
• WordPress Workshop PPT

A widget is a “configurable code snippet” that makes it possible to modify function and appearance of a WordPress hosted site without the need to know HTML. Whether you are using self-hosted WordPress or managing a site at WordPress.com, widgets are “discrete blocks of goodness” that are added or deleted using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

This tutorial provides an overview of widgets available on WordPress.com.

1. In the administration pane (while creating a new post), “Post Password” is the third entry in the right-hand navigation.
2. Click the “+” to expand the menu and then type a password into the field.
3. The post or page will be linked in your navigation, but the page will prompt for a password (see screenshot below – click image to see larger version).

If you want a page to be viewable only to yourself — and not linked in your navigation — set the post to private.

Categories are not to be confused with “tags” (a more modern, Web 2.0 concept). Think of categories as major subject headings. If you are in one of my classes, chances are you will be a discussion leader at some point in time. Thus I have you create a category, “discussion leader.”

Q: How do you create a new category?

A: In the administrative (write a new post) view, there is a blank field just below “categories” — with an “add” button to its right. Simply type the category name in the field and click “add.” The category will appear in the list in alphabetical order, already pre-selected. You can categorize a post in more than one category.

You can “manage” categories via the “Manage” tab in the administrative tool bar.

Q. What’s a tag?

A: In general, tags are “micro” whereas categories are “macro.” Tags are something like public keywords. Before it was possible to tag content, many of us used our categories in this manner. Just look at my WiredPen blog as an example! I need to rework those categories and turn some of them into tags. But that’s four years of posts and a lot of work!

Q. How to tag?

A. That’s easy! Just type the set of tags (keywoards) in the “tags” field just below the blog post field.

If you are using your blog for multiple classes, I recommend that you *tag* each post with the course number (like COM300 or COM546). This will give you a way to look at all posts associated with a course.

Your instructor will probably specify categories for blog posts that make it easy to find assignments.

• Give your blog a unique name (not “COM300″ or “My COM300 Blog” — that’s not unique in a class of 30 students!) — and don’t worry if you decide to change it later.
• You should edit (Manage, Posts) the pre-existing “Hello World” post or create a new (Write, Post) post.
• Change the default “Presentation” by experimenting with the templates. Some templates allow you to change the header image or colors.
• Modify “Options, General” — set the time to “-8″ hours so that we all have the same timestamps!
• Review (and modify if desired) “Options, Discussion.” I recommend enabling “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail” AND “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 2 or more links” in order to minimize comment spam.
• Review (and modify if desired) “Options, Privacy.”
• Consider creating all the category tags you will use in this class.

(2) Review these instructions from WordPress

(3) Watch this Quicktime Movie – From UW or watch the YouTube clip (smaller screen size)

That’s all there is to it!

Note: WP changed the interface in Mar 2008. These screenshots are no longer accurate for WordPress.com but are for an earlier installed version of WP. When I’ve updated this, I’ll link to it here.

This post is “how to” insert an image into a WordPress blog post.

First, if the image is not yet hosted on a webserver somewhere, you need to upload it to WordPress or to an image hosting site such as Flickr or PhotoBucket.

The “upload to WordPress” is easy — look at the bottom of your blog post window: there is an “upload” tab. Browse your harddrive and find your image (this is web-based FTP). Be sure your cursor is where you want the image to appear when you do this step! [Note: you have only 50 MB 3 GB of free space at WordPress -- if you're going to use images frequently, you'll want to host them on an external website.]

The other way to embed an image is to use the visual tool bar icon that looks like a small tree. You’ll click this icon when you are ready to insert an image: the image will be inserted where the cursor is active.

When you click the “tree” (image icon), you’ll see a popup window with fields for the image URL (location), alternate text, etc.:

This tool provides a little more control over image placement (the alignment drop-down menu) — although with both methods, you can edit the HTML by clicking the “code” tab at the top of the post window!