Blog FAQ
- What is WordPress?
- How do I get a blog on SSIS Blogs?
- How do I just get a username?
- Once I have a blog, where and how do I log in?
- How do I change my password?
- How do I change my blog title?
- How do I deal with issues of privacy?
- What’s the difference between writing a post and writing a page?
- What are comments and how do I manage them?
- Why do I only see code buttons in the text editor?
- How do I add users as authors to my blog?
- What’s a feed?
- How do I upload a document and place it in a post or page?
- How much upload space do I have on SSIS Blogs?
- How do I make my blog look different?
- How do I add a custom image to the header of my blog?
- What are widgets?
- How do I get an avatar?
- How do I password protect a page or post?
- How do I embed YouTube videos?
- How do I copy and paste word documents?
- How do you create a lead article
- How do I create a featured article?
- How do the middle categories show up?
- How can teachers easily track student writing?
- Where did this FAQ originate?
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Often associated with a blog, WordPress is much more than a blog- it is a simple and easy-to-use web publishing platform that can allow you to build a web presence with little or no fuss!
How do I get a blog on SSIS Blogs?
To setup a blog on SSIS Blogs go to the motherblog and enter a username and password (you must use your SSIS moodle password). On the left hand side the get a blog link will allow you to create a blog.
Once you have done this, you will be taken to a page that asks you to specify the path to your blog (use first name last initial all lowercase), enter a blog title (you can change this later on), and select the privacy settings for your blog.
How do I just get a username?
Your username on the SSIS Blogs is the same as your Moodle login username. No changes made to username and password within Wordpress will change either username or password. This has to be changed within Moodle.
Once I have a blog, where and how do I log in?
First things first, where is your blog? Your individual blogs should be located at the address you specified on SSISBlogs. Your initial blog address is determined by the domain you choose when creating your blog. For example, if the domain you chose is “myblog” your blog address will be > http://blog.ssis.edu.vn/myblog
To access the administrative back-end of your blog, you should see a login link on the main page. If you do not see this link, for whatever reason, enter the following line to the end of your url address: “/wp-admin” (no quotes) – the address should look like the following: http://blog.ssis.edu.vn/myblog/wp-admin
Once you are there, you will see two fields asking for your login and password as shown below.
All password changes need to be made within moodle. If you have forgotten your password in Moodle you can select the forgotten password link and reset your Moodle password. This will also reset the Wordpress password.
How do I change my blog title?
To change the title of your blog go to the Settings tab in the administrative back-end and you will see a field for blog title as well as a field for the site tagline, which is a space for a brief description of your site. Just type in a new title or tagline and save the changes.
How do I deal with issues of privacy?
Privacy is a major concern, and it is important to realize from the start that the spaces you create here are, by default, open and accessible to the general public. You can password protect individual pages and posts as well as select privacy settings for your entire blog or website.
To make your blog or site private, go to the Settings tab and click on the Privacy subtab. From here, click on one of the the five options for controlling external access to your space, each of which is detailed in the image below. It is important to keep in mind, however, that if you restrict your privacy settings to members of the SSIS Blogs community, registered users, or administrator only, the RSS feed will be disabled.
What’s the difference between writing a post and writing a page?
This is an important terminological/conceptual distinction to grasp, as posts and pages serve radically different functions. A post is an article that shows up in the chronology of your blog. In other words, posts appear in your blog, most recent at the top of the page.
A page is what most folks may be more familiar with. This is a static space that is not part of the chronological logic (try saying that five times fast) of the blog. A page sits outside of this inverted time line, and often features more static content like information about the site, the author, a syllabus, readings, etc.
What are comments and how do I manage them?
Part of the logic of a blog is allowing people to comment on your work. Comments are often associated with posts (as opposed to pages- see an explanation of this distinction above) and offer a way to have a discussion about a particular post.
Often times, initial comments are placed in a moderation queue until you approve them. Once you approve a comment from a user, he or she should be able to comment freely thereafter. You can view the comments on your blog as well as those awaiting moderation in the Comments tab in the back-end of your blog. If you want to change the permissions for your comments- say allow anyone to comment without moderating- see the Settings tab and look for the Discussion subtab. This is where you can control the comment settings.
Additionally, when writing a post, you can turn off the comments on a post-by-post basis by clicking on the Discussion section of the right-hand sidebar and un-checking the comments field..
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Why do I only see code buttons in the text editor?
If for some reason you don’t see a visual text editor (as pictured in the image directly above) then you have to enable this option in the Users tab in the Your Profile section.
In the top-left hand corner of the Your Profile page there is a check box that says “Use the visual text editor when writing”. Make sure this box is checked. After that, editing your blog will be much, much more intuitive.
If this does not work, another potential cause of the problem is that you are using Apple’s Safari web browser. Try another browser (we highly recommend Firefox) and see if the problem persists.
How do I add users as authors to my blog?
Go to the administrative backend of your blog, and navigate to the Design–>Widgets subtab. Widgets allow you to customize your sidebar. Add the widget titled “Add Users” (you may also want to add widget like recent posts, recent comments, meta (which is the login link) and anything else that catches your fancy. Also, you can drag the widgets to arrange them as you see fit.
After that, you should edit the add users widget (click on the edit button) and make it so that those who are added are authors, and no password is required nor a pre-existing list of emails. Then save the new sidebar settings.
What’s a feed?
A feed is a way to subscribe to blog posts, comments, etc. You can subscribe to a feed use an RSS reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines. To find out more about this RSS thing click here.
How do I upload a document and place it in a post or page?
You can easily upload documents, such as a course calendar or syllabus, into a post or page. Doing this is relatively straightforward. Go to Write → Post (or Page) and look for the “Add media” button that looks like a gray asterisk, as pictured below.
How much upload space do I have on SSIS Blogs?
Lots…. 
Additionally, you cannot upload a single file that is larger than 6 MB.
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How do I make my blog look different?
You can change the look and feel of your blog using the Design tab. When you click on the Design tab you’ll notice you have over 90 themes for your site to choose from.
A new feature of the latest version of WordPress paginates the themes and provides users with a preview of each theme that they can either activate or close and select another theme to preview.
How do I add a custom image to the header of my blog?
Not all of the themes provided by SSIS Blogs allow you to add a custom header image. In fact, each theme has its own options through which you can customize the look and feel of your blog, so the theme, in effect, is much more than just look and feel- it is also functionality and possibility.
If you need to do specific customizations of your theme for whatever reason, this is possible. Just contact your Instructional Technology Specialist for more details or contact us here. To read more specifics about selecting themes, what specific themes provide you with, and the ways in which you can customize your theme click here.
If you are uploading large pdf files or images it may be preferable to use an outside service that you can integrate with UMW Blogs, such as Flickr for your photos, YouTube for your videos, and/or DivShare for your files. This is probably the best practice, because if you ever want to move your blog to another service you will have persistent links to documents, videos, and images that you will not have to update for the blog when it is moved.
What are widgets?
“Widgets” is just a silly buzzword for the functionality built into WordPress that allows you to customize the sidebar of your WordPress site without knowing HTML. You can use widgets to add a list of recent photos, comments, flickr photos, del.icio.us links, and much more. You can find your widgets in the Design → Widgets subtab. You may also get access to more widgets as you activate new plugins, for many of the plugins available have an associated widget, such as flickrRSS.
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How do I get an avatar?
Go to Gravatar and associate an avatar of your choice with the email you use on SSIS Blogs. Gravatar is an external service that links avatars with e-mail addresses so that anytime you comment on another blog with that e-mail address your avatar will show up if enabled on that particular blog.
All SSIS Blogs sites provide the ability to enable Gravatars. Just go to Design → Gravatar and check the “Enable Gravatars on your blog” button.
How do I password protect a page or post?
Password protecting a post or page is quite simple. All you need to do is look for “post password” or “page password” in the “Advanced Options” section and enter a value into the text field. This value can be whatever you want it to be, but if you want others to see what is in this page or post, you will have to share the password with them.
How do I embed YouTube videos?
When writing a post or page in your blog, look for the little Youtube icon in the visual text editor and click on it.
Next, paste the URL provided by the respective online video service in the dialog box. For certain video sites, the actual URL in the web browser field is not always the correct URL- for example, in YouTube you can find the correct URL in the field to the right of the video.
How do I copy and paste word documents?
Click on the button the arrow is pointing to below- affectionately termed the “Kitchen Sink”- in order to get additional options for your editing toolbar.
Go from this:
to this:
After following the step above you will see an icon with the MS Word icon in your visual text editor (which the arrow is pointing to). Click on this and copy the Word Document text into this window and save it. This strips out all the MS Word code and “cleans” the text for publishing on WordPress. There may be some minor formatting you have to update afterwards, but most of the formatting from MS Word should remain intact.
How Do you create a lead article
The lead article is selected by the motherblog administrator. The selected article needs to be assigned to the news category. An image needs to be uploaded to the motherblog and it’s file path must be added to a custom field named leadimage. The excerpted text should be manually created by taking about 30 words and adding the words to the excerpted text area. If this is not done then the post defaults to the wordpress excerpt and that is not enough text to fill the containing area. In addition, if you have too much text the text will run out of the box area.
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How do I create a featured article?
They need to be given the category Featured Articles.
How do the middle categories show up?
These are hard coded into the index.php file found in the SSIS theme line 43. They are referred to by their numeric ID.
How can teachers easily track student writing?
It is easy to track your students by using tags and rss feeds have each of your students add the tag for you class in their post. Then use the following example to structure your rss feed. http://blog.ssis.edu.vn/feed/?tag=mediatools in this example replacing mediatools with the tag you are using for your class will result in a RSS subscription to all of your students writing.
Where did this FAQ originate?
This FAQ was taken and very slightly modified from the FAQ at the UMW Blogs Site http://umwblogs.org/support/.
