How to Post to the Site

Part 1: Setting up Your Account

The news page uses the web-publishing service called Blogger. You can use Blogger to set up your own account to post to the news page or other weblogs. You sign in with your own username and password, type what you want in a little box in your web browser, and press a button and it will publish it to the website. You don't need to know HTML or anything. This is what you need to do to get your own account set up.

1. Blitz me, Sylvia Chi to let me know you want to set it up. I have to send a separate "invitation" from my Blogger account to each person who wants an account.

2. You will receive an e-mail inviting you to the blog "team". It'll be from "Dartmouth College Greens via Blogger". It'll give you a long complicated link to go to. You have to use this link in particular or it won't work.

3. Sign up for your account. The link you followed will look like the screenshot above. Unless you already have a Blogger account, go to the second part, "New Users". Choose a username (only used to log in and out), a password, and make sure "Join this blog?" and set to "Yes". Then click "sign up".

The next screen will look like this. Fill in the blanks as necessary. Make sure you check the box next to "I agree to the terms of service." FYI, when you post to the Greens webpage, what you fill in here for your first and last names, as well as e-mail address, will be posted on the page. Also, you'll get a welcome e-mail from Blogger with your password and username for your reference.

This is the next screen you'll see, which is the main Blogger interface. Along the top is a gray bar with buttons, then there's a big white text box where you type what you want, and under that is the Posts section. It shows the most recent posts made to the weblog.

Part 2: Posting to the Website

1. Type what you have to say in the big empty white text box. You don't need to use any HTML if you don't know any.

Note that Blogger will automatically add the date and time of your entry and your name (with a link to your e-mail) to each post.

You'll notice in the upper right corner of your browser window there are these buttons (shown above). The first row of buttons is pretty self-explanatory: "Help" brings you to Blogger's help section, "Sign Out" logs you out of Blogger, and "Blogger" brings you back to the Blogger.com homepage. In the second row, the three left-most buttons let you insert links and use bold and italics. The other two buttons are the "Post" and "Post & Publish buttons".

2. Publishing your post. After you're done typing what you have to say, click the "Post & Publish button". This will post your text to the blog and put it on the website. It should show up on the website in just a couple seconds.

What's the difference between posting and posting & publishing? If you just click post, it'll show up in the bottom half of your Blogger window and save it there, but it won't show up on the finished website until you click the button that says "Publish". (It'll be orange and show up on the right side of the window.) This is useful if you're typing up a post and you don't have time to finish it at the moment or something like that.

3. Inserting a link. The farthest left button in the upper-right corner is the link button, it's the one that looks like a little glove with a couple chain links. When you click on it, a little window will pop up, like so:

Type your link into the prompt, making sure that it starts with "http://". Then press OK.

You'll notice that in the big white text box, it'll show the HTML code for the link. It'll look like this:

<a href="http://www.adbusters.org"></a>

- except instead of http://www.adbusters.org, it'll say whatever you typed in the window.

Next, you have to type in what you want your link to say. Just type in what you want the link to say in between these signs: ><. For example:

<a href="http://www.adbusters.org">Great website!</a>

After you publish your post, the link will look like this:

Great website!

And you can incorporate links in sentences like so:

This is a <a href="http://www.adbusters.org">great website!</a>

It'll look like this:

This is a great website!

4. Using bold and italics. This works a lot like the link button. Click the Bold or Italic button in the upper-right corner. Instead of popping up a little window, it'll just insert the HTML code into the textbox. It'll either be  for bold or  for italics. Just type what you want bolded or italicized between the ><, like so:

This will be bold and this will be italicized.

It'll look like this:

This will be bold and this will be italicized.

5. Editing or removing a post. If you mess up your post or just want to change something, all you have to do is click the blue "edit" link that will show up under your post in the "Posts" section of the Blogger window.

It'll look like the screenshot above. Then, your post will magically reappear in the text-box above. Make your changes and press "Post & Publish". If you want to completely delete your post, you'll notice that a "Delete" button has shown up in the upper right button bar. If you change your mind and want to cancel your changes, you can press the "Cancel" button.

That's it.

Hit the "Sign Out" button when you're done. In the future when you want to post, just go to http://www.blogger.com and enter your username and password. You'll see a link on the right that'll say "Dartmouth College Greens - News". Click on that and you will get back to the blog-editing page.

Any things I missed? Still don't get it? Questions, comments, ice cream? Let me know.