For your Rhetoric and Civic Life course you'll be creating a blog
at sites.psu.edu using the WordPress
platform at Penn State. WordPress is a
blogging or site creation platform and this video is going to go over how to create
a site on WordPress. You should pay particular attention to
instructions in your course about more details in your assignment.
To begin go to the top left and login with your Penn State access ID.
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One of the first steps
that we're going to take is to take a look at how to edit your profile.
So, on the right you should see a blank avatar.
And you can click on that and it will take
you to your profile on the WordPress platform.
So if you click on the profile tab, here's where you'll get a chance to
edit some basic information about yourself. So you can put in your
full name and a brief description about yourself. And you
can also change your avatar or upload an image that will represent you
across the blogging platform at Penn State.
Once you've completed these simple steps, you are
ready to create a site. So, on the right you'll see a create a site
button. You can click on that to get started.
So on this page you will be entering some basic site information.
You'll want to think about the url in the site title for your blog.
The url, once you create it, it can't be changed. So you want to put some
thought into it. I'm going to call mine
my last name, rcl,
blog.
Your site title you'll be able to change at any point after you've created your site. But you want to
put something in to get started.
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I'm gonna put in Miffit's Rhetoric and
Civic Life blog.
For privacy settings you do want to keep your...
you do want to keep this yes selected. And that's so that other
people in the class and your instructor can find your blog when they go to search for it.
And from there you just click create a site.
From here you can click on
this url and you see what your site looks like that you've just created.
On this page you'll see the basic
components of your blog. So you have your title up here.
A banner image. Here's where your blog posts
will appear. And then here's a sample static page.
Now we're gonna take a look at the dashboard and learn about how you can edit all these
pieces. So if you click over on the top to dashboard,
that will bring you to the back end
of your website. So there's a couple of areas
that we're gonna pay attention to here. The three things that we're gonna do is look at how to add a post,
how to add a page, and how to change your blog appearance.
So if you click to post,
you'll get the option up here to add new.
So let's go ahead and put in a sample post. You can see what to do
on this page.
To write a post, you're just gonna create a title. Put in
the body content and use your rich text editor to do any formatting
or styling that you'd like. There are two things to pay
attention to here, categories, and tags.
So the categories would be like the broad
types of posts that you'd be writing. In your class in particular you might be writing
you might have a passion category for example.
Your tags in this course are really important because it's how your
instructor and classmates are going to be able to find your blog post,
These texts typically tend to be more focused on the content of the post.
but for our purposes we're going to use RCL 12/13.
Passion,
and then you may have specific instructions in your course about adding
your instructors last name and any other tags that are gonna help
everyone find your assignments. So once
you've ran a post and tagged it correctly,
you can go ahead and publish.
And your post just appears
right on your blog homepage.
Now, posts are different
than pages, because posts are where you're gonna write your entries
every week and that updates all the time. Pages are static content
that doesn't change that much. Right now you have one sample
page that's already published on your site.
We can go ahead and edit this.
You might make this something like an about page.
And write a brief description.
about who you are and what this site is about.
So why you've created it for the course, what you hope to accomplish, and so on.
We can update that.
And now when you go to your site,
you'll see both your blog page
and then also your about page.
WordPress also let's you
customize the look and feel of your site quite a bit. So if you go to
appearance, themes,
you'll see that this 2010 theme is the one that you have right now.
That's the default. There's also a number of other themes to
select if you want to change the look of your site.
2011 is highly recommend. As is
the Coraline theme and Cleaner. There are some that are
just easier or more difficult to use so it depends on your comfort level.
But when you're on this page you can click customize
and then go in
and change the title of your blog and the tag line.
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You can also change the header image.
So you can upload an image of your own or
find one that's copyright free or Creative Commons
and so on.
Now you'll see that my tag line is changed, because I made that change here.
So those are the main steps that you'll
want to take to get started with your blog site.
If you have other questions or you want to learn more,
you can go back to sites.psu.edu
and go to the support page.
It's from the main site. You can click support.
And there are a number of options here that give you more
instruction for how to customize and develop your blog.
If you have other questions, you can also go to
sites.psu.edu/rcl
support
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On this page you can post questions that you have about the blog assignment
or any technical difficulties that you're having. And somebody will get back to you
here.