WordPress

Blogging at Middlebury

Introduction

WordPress MU is an open source platform that is used at Middlebury for individual blogs. Uses include journals creative writing tools, and news publishing.

New Blog Creation and Access

New Blogs

You must have a Middlebury netid to have a WordPress blog. To create a blog

• go to the login page
• then go to the sign-up page to give your blog a name.

To learn more, go to the Blogging at Middlebury blog.

Organization

Entries

An author adds material to their blog by creating entries. Entries may be of any length, and can include text, audio and video. Once an entry is created, it may be previewed, saved as unpublished, or save as published. Only published entries will be seen by visitors.

Entries can be edited after they are published.

Commenting

Visitors to a blog may leave a comment through the use of a simple web form. In most cases, this is a name, an email address, and the text of their comment. Authors may decide whether comments appear immediately on the blog, or if they are held until the author can read them.

RSS

WordPress supports both publishing its own content via RSS (really simple syndication) as well as accessing RSS feeds with widgets.

Tagging

All entries can be assigned one or more tags for use in a guided search.

Podcasting

Links to audio files in a WordPress entry will appear in the RSS feed. Visitors may subscribe to this feed as a podcast.

Access to Blogs

A visitor can view all published entries in a blog. Unpublished entries may have a scheduled publishing date, or they may be manually published.

A blog owner may allow, or not allow comments on their blog.

Customization

Widgets

Widgets are available to add character and functionality to the blog. Some widgets that are available include:

• Calendar
• Latest entries
• Search
• Creative Commons License
• Tag cloud
• Subscribe to feed

A feed widget can be added to create a list of links to any other blog or website that has an rss feed. Also, third party widgets can be added.

WordPress at Middlebury

Journal/Research Use

For more examples, see the blog roll on the home page of Blogging at Middlebury.