Quick review of the third class

The lecture and handout are here.

We started by a brief mention of the Post Options, which you'll see as a link under the compose window when you are posting. The primary purpose is to be able to change the post date and time, which is the only method I know of to re-arrange the order in which posts display.

We then went over how to add images in Blogger; basically, click on the picture (Add Image) icon, browse to upload a file from your My Pictures or other folder, choose the layout and size, click to accept the Terms of Use the first time you are uploading, and click Upload Image.

We briefly reviewed posting to a blog from a Flickr account (on each image page in Flickr, if you're logged in, you'll see a little "Blog This" right above the picture.) I had previously created two posts about images:

• http://blogging-mas-spring08.blogspot.com/2008/03/where-to-find-photos-and-illustrations.html
• http://blogging-mas-spring08.blogspot.com/2008/03/blogging-photo-from-flickr.html

Then we moved to the overview of HTML/XHTML, which you'll see in the PowerPoint. The most important thing to remember is that tags are marked by angle-brackets and one goes on each side of what you're telling the browser to display differently; the first one says "turn this on" (bold, italic, whatever) and the second one turns it off. So to make the word THE bold, I would preface it with and follow it with (the slash means "turn off").

I said that it really helped to memorize a few basic tags because you can use them when leaving a comment, for example, when there is no toolbar. To experiment: create a new post, and flip back and forth between the Compose and Edit HTML tabs to see it in action. But warning: Blogger does try to "read your mind" and will mess up some of your style tags.

Finally, we went over some of the Blogger control panel settings. These are all under the Settings tab, which all of you should see as a link in your Dashboard. (If you don't, let me know).

The most important ones are:

• Basic (title and description of the blog)
• Formatting (number of days or posts to show on the front page, format of time-stamps, and the Post Template which can save you time if your posts have a consistent layout)
• Comments (for who can comment, whether comments are moderated, whether there is a word verification, and who should be notified by email when there's a new comment)
• Archiving (how frequently)
• Email (allows up to 10 people to get all new posts as they are published, and which also lets you EACH set up an email address to post directly (ie, you compose a message to that email address, and it gets posted or set to draft depending on the session))
• Permissions (who can post to the blog and who can administrate it)

We'll talk more about settings and layout next week!