Parts of a Blog, Lesson #5

Blogs come in all sorts of shapes and forms.

Some contain only posts with no other content, while other blogs feature all sorts of bells and whistles — calendars, archives, copyright info, pictures, and more. Check out these links to learn a lot more about WordPress blogging and find out more about the seven essential parts of a blog.

Take some time to examine our course blog, and you’ll observe a number of different parts with different purposes.

Our Start a Family Blog course blog has the following parts:

• A center section features our blog posts. The most recent post always appears at the top, and the older posts are below, going backwards by date. I’ve set this blog to show the seven most recent posts on the home page. As we accumulate more and more posts, links at the bottom of the blog page (at the end of the seventh post) will direct readers to move back and forth to see other posts (older or newer).

Course Questions and Inquiries: Lesson #4

If you have a question, please add it as a comment to this post.  Your thoughts, ideas, cries for help, and other inquiries are most welcome. As much as possible Marti will check for questions on a daily basis.  Some answers will be in the form of comments on this post, while others may be significant enough to merit a separate blog post.

So What Are Blogs Anyway? Lesson #3

Video, from the series, “In Plain English.” published on YouTube. WordPress makes it  easy to add a YouTube video, and I’ll post more about YouTube in a later lesson.

Start a Family Blog Class Expectations: Lesson #2

Expectations

I ask everyone to plan to participate in three ways:

1. Subscribe to the class blog after I post the instructions. Once you subscribe you will receive an e-mail each time I post a lesson (I expect to post somewhere between 10-12 lessons, though I have already created eight.)
2. Comment at least a few times (maybe at least five times?) on the class blog. Your comments can be in the form of ideas, discoveries, requests for more info, or just requests for help. One of my posts will introduce a question and answer center where you can post your inquiries. Remember, if you post a question, the chances are that other people need the answer to that question.
3. Share your blog address when you begin constructing your site so other course participants can visit.

For each short unit I will upload a short written piece, called a post, with the content of the lesson.  Each post, at the bottom, has a place where comments can be left (you’ve seen comment sections before, I am sure).

Welcome to the Online Class! Lesson #1

Welcome to the first GDS online technology class for parents.

In this Start a Family Blog course we will begin by learning some basic facts about blogs, move on and learn about the blog for this class, and then — finally — each of you will begin to create and develop your own blogging site. We will spend the month of June working together. This course site will be up and available all summer long for consultation.  At this time we have 28 participants.

For the class, as well as for your blogging assignments, we will be using WordPress.com to create blogs and add free features. WordPress has some excellent options as a part of the free package, but an advantage of this site is that additional features, upgrades, and a privacy upgrade are available for small fees. The WordPress community also has excellent technical support and a more protected environment, though the blog is still easily available to your readers.

To help you understand more about how blogs are structured, I will add explanations, features, and new bells and whistles to the class site as we go along — the class lessons.