Using the Blog

What is a Blog?

A Blog is web diary that allows you to write periodic articles or essays online and have them automatically stored and chronologically displayed for you. It can be a soap box, a lecture, or simply a place where you can record thoughts and opinions about your day-to-day life, hobbies or experiences. It can be a useful way of keeping your visitors informed about your activities, and also representing your personality and tastes.

In addition, if you want, it can accept comments and responses from site visitors (which you can moderate), and can over time build up an interesting discussion thread about the topics included. It can also lead to some fairly robust opinions being expressed, so the ability to moderate comments left by visitors may prove useful ;-)

Adding a New Story to Your Blog

Your Spanglefish Blog is very easy to use. If your Blog page isn’t visible on your site menu, then you must first activate the page by going to Site Settings > Manage Pages > Change Page Visibility,  and change its status to Visible or Protected so that it is accessible for editing.

Once your Blog Page is activated and visible on the menu, editing it by clicking on the 'Add Story' button on it will present you with various options . . .

• Entry Title - the title that will appear at the top of the story
• Alias - if you leave this field blank then the article will be labeled with your Admin name.
• Summary - used on the Blog to link to the full article.
• Article - the main text editor field where you add your full story.
• Date and Time fields - handy so the site can automatically list and archive older articles. By default the system shows the current time and ate, but you can change this if you want - for instance you could add a story dated three days in advance so that it automatically appears on your site whilst you are away on holiday.
• Comments Status - this will let you configure whether you let users add comments in response to your Blog entries, and the degree to which you will moderate them. Generally it's a good idea to have moderation active, as there are still many adolescents of all ages out there who find it funny to post naughty words and pretend to be grown-ups. The ‘Prevent Future Comments’ can be used to prevent comments being added by users who have abused the system, whilst letting other still contribute.