Next you’ll see Blogs. Next to eGroups, this is the fastest way to communicate with lots of people at once. This section, like your Inbox, has its own submenu. Moving from left to right:
- My Blog shows you all the blog entries you’ve made.
- My Contacts brings up all the blog entries of people on your contact list.
- Most Recent shows all the most recent blog posts of any blogs throughout the system you’ve got access to.
- Top Rated shows all the blog entries rated highest throughout the system,
- Most Read shows the most popular, by readership, blogs throughout the system, and
- Unpublished shows any blog entries you’ve started but not published yet.
- Start a new blog entry by clicking the green plus sign next to “New Blog.”
Let’s stick with Blogs for a second. There are a lot of things to keep in mind when working with blogs, and a lot of ways to communicate around them. Click Most Recent tab, and let’s start there. You’ll see a list of blogs come up, again, ordered by date. Click the title of the first blog you see, and we’ll take a look at all the things you can do.
- You’ll see the text of the blog post come up in the center of your screen. To the right of the blog, notice all the author information. You can view the author’s profile (View
Profile), add the author as a contact (Add Contact), add this blog entry to your own blog
(Blog This) or send the author a private message (Contact Author).
- You can also rate the blog post, depending on how useful you find it to be. See the stars underneath the author’s information? Click the first star
(counting from left to right) if it’s not very helpful, the second star if it’s a little better than that, and so on. All the ratings everyone’s ever given the post get averaged
together to create the "score." (Don’t worry, the author never sees exactly what you rated the post!)
- Under that rating, you can see the number of times the post has been rated, the number of times people have commented on the post, and the number of times people have viewed the post.
Now scroll all the way to the bottom of the blog post. The first thing you’ll see is the section marked Permalink. You can copy and paste this URL into an email or into a web page to link directly to this blog post.
You can also add a comment to the blog post (if the author’s opened it up for comments) or add a link to the post.
Posting a blog
Want to create a blog post? Let’s scroll back up to the top of the screen to see how. Up at the top of the blog menu, to the far right, you’ll see the green plus sign next to “New Blog.” Click there to add an entry to your own blog. You’ll see a new screen come up with an editing box in the center. Here’s how to make your very own blog post:
- Give your entry a title by typing in the box marked Title of Your Blog Entry.
- Then, use the editing box to type whatever you’d like. The buttons are very similar to Microsoft Word.
- When you’re done typing, select who is allowed to read your blog entry. You can select from:
- Public, which means that anyone can read your blog entry.
- Authenticated, which means that anyone who’s logged in to the system (but not necessarily an IAAP Member) can read your post.
- IAAPHQ Members, which means that only IAAP Members can read your blog post, or
- My Contacts, which means that only people you’ve added to your contact list can read the post.
- After that, you can decide who can comment on your post, using a similar list. The difference here is that you can allow no one to comment on your entry.
- Then, either click Publish, which takes your blog entry live, or save for later, which means you can come back and edit before it goes live. Let’s go ahead and publish your blog entry.
- Now you’ll see the beginnings of your blog, with one entry. Click that entry’s title, and you’ll see that you have very similar options to someone else’s blog entry, with one key exception. On the left hand side, there’s an icon for you to delete your blog entry.