Blogging

For Gold and Platinum Members, Orthodox Biz offers a personal blog. Why would you want that? Simple. You can go to Blogspot or some other free service and get a blog and start blogging to your heart's content. The question is - will anybody find your blog? If no one finds your blog, is it really benefitting you professionally? Blogging in the 21st Century is about calling attention to your business, your ministry, or yourself. Orthodox Biz aggregates thousands of users in one spot who will be exposed to your blog. Many of them will choose to read it. Orthodox Biz is ranked with all the search engines, and can get your blog noticed. These are powerful incentives to use Orthodox Biz to promote yourself and your business.

However, this is Web publishing. To do it the best way possible is going to require some effort on your part to learn the system. It isn't complicated, as the following tutorial shows, but it does take a little effort on your part to do it right.

Getting Started Blogging

To blog, you have to get to the My Blog Dashboard. There are three ways to get there:

1) Select the option from the Member Menu to Write/Edit Blogs. We covered that in an earlier section, but it is repeated in the image below:

2) Go to your profile. On the tab for MyBlog is a link to the MyBlog Dashboard.

3) Log in, and then go to the Blog page. It is under the Articles tab on the Main Menu. On the Blog Page, there is an option for 'My Account' as part of the menu at the top. You can click that and get to the MyBlog Dashboard.

Once you are at the MyBlog dashboard, you see at view as detailed below:

To create a new blog entry, just click the Write New Entry button. You will get the window that shows in the images that follow. Each image has instructions, so look at them in order to get an overview of what the Blog Entry screen is all about.

Adding Already Uploaded Images to a Blog Entry

Uploading a New Image to the Blog Entry

You have an image on your computer that you would like to have in your blog. You can not simply copy and paste the image! Lots of people have tried, but it doesn't work. You have to upload the image to the server. Don't worry, that isn't hard. Just follow the steps detailed below.

1. Click the small 'Upload' link labeled as number 1 in the above image. That switches the box below it from browsing existing photos to having an upload box so that you can select and upload an image.

2. Click the 'Browse' button. That will pop up the window that shows you the desktop of your computer.

3. Click the file to upload.

4. Click the 'Open' button.

5. Click the 'Upload' button. If you want the image automatically made smaller, then leave the button selected to 'Auto Resize.'

If you do all the steps correctly, you will see this message appear:

Now, I have the file on the server, but I want to add it to my blog entry. Just do the same thing you saw earlier. Put your cursor where you want the image, then find it in the browse window and click it.

Making a Caption for an Image

Notice that so far, we have not gone into any HTML coding. The blog tool allows you to pretty much just write/paste without really having to mess with anything all that geeky. But, image captions require a little effort. If you don't want image captions, then you don't need to do this process. However, if you want to label an image, the easiest way is to put the image and its caption in a one column, two row table. To insert a table, click the 'Toggle Editor' button as show below to turn off the normal editor window and to reveal the HTML source code.

This is what the native HTML code looks like:

This image shows how the HTML code for a table is put in around the tag.

Here is that code repeated:

< table border="0" align="left"> < tbody> < tr> < td>< img src="This is where the URL to the image goes. That is already in the code as it was loaded the editor" alt="" />< /td> < /tr> < tr> < td>Image Caption < /tr> < /tbody> < /table>

This creates a single column, two row table. The image will be on top, the caption underneath. When you have the code in, click the 'Toggle Editor' link again to see the result. Please note, in the code above I put a space between the opening character < of each command. That is to keep this code from executing and actually displaying a table. If you are gong to use this code, then get rid of that extract space.

The table is in, but as shown above, I needed to apply some styling to the Image Caption. I could have done that in the code view also by highlighting the words and then clicking the 'B' button and the align button. Or I can do it here.

Pasting Text From Microsoft Word

Do not copy text from Microsoft Word and then paste it directly into the blogging tool! That is bad, bad, bad. The image below shows you how to do this. You need to click on the 'Paste From Word' button so that the text from Word is properly converted to HTML. The Web runs on HTML, your Microsoft Word does not.

The next two images show how to paste from Word:

After I click 'Insert' I get back to my blog entry window and I see the code. But the nature of pasting from Word creates some challenges such as extra code at the beginningof the article and double-spaceing. See below:

To correct the problems, I need to use the 'Toggle Editor' button again and reveal the source code.

To show the difference, I just delete one of the empty paragraph tags. You can see that the first two paragraphs are now fixed, but the rest of the paragraphs are double-spaced. I can correct them here also, see below:

Understanding the Editor Tool Bar

To use most of the editor tool functions, highlight the text and then click the button to apply that function. Starting from left to right:

1) Bold - Highlight some text, click this button make the highlighted text bold.

2) Underline - Highlight some text, click this button to underline the text.

3) Italics - Highlight some text, click this button to make it italicized.

4) Strike Through - Highlight some text, then click this button to make the text have a strike through.

5) Unordered List - Highlight some text, then click this button to insert bullets.

6) Order List - Highlight some text, then click this button to insert numbers.

7) Indent and Reduce Indent - Select some text, then click the indent button to make a blockquote. If a block of text is indented, then highlight and click the other button to reduce the indent. This is great for quotes!

8) Link and break link - Highlight some text, then click this button that looks like a chain link:

9) Image Button - This has been covered before.

10) Undo and Redo - If you make a mistake, you can use this button to undo it. There is also a 'redo' if the undo button has been used.

11) Eraser - This strips formatting from text. You can highlight text, then hit this eraser tool and get rid of formatting like bold, different font classes, etc. This is very useful when you paste text from another Website.

12) Paste From Word - This has a separate section explaining it.

13) Insert a Page Break - This was covered in the first part of the blogging tutorial. Put your cursor where you want the break between the teaser text and the main text to be and then click this button to insert the page break.

Why Should you Blog?

Why should you blog? A lot of reasons. As Website Magazine recently noted:

Blogging is the single easiest way to get your story out to the world at large.

What should you blog about? Blog about what you do for a living. People pay you for what you know and what you can do. Blogging is an opportunity to get people to listen to your expertise. It helps build your brand and controls the flow of information about it. That is especially critical if the brand you are selling is you.

When you submit blogs, they automatically go to the Blog main page, and they populate the "Latest News" and "Latest Blogs" areas. Selected blogs (we read all of them) will be published to the frontpage as "Featured Articles." We know talent when we see it, and we reward it accordingly.

The picture for your blog will come from your profile. The description is keyed into the blogging dashboard itself. Feel free to upload pictures for use in your blog using the file upload tool in the blog.

Do I Have to Blog About Business?

Absolutely not! Are you interested in promoting your ideas? Are you associated with a ministry that needs exposure? Or a secular organization that Orthodox Christians need to hear about? Are you interested in commenting on social or other topics? All of that is welcome. We expect the blog to include a wide range of topics. Optimally, we'd like to cover topics that are neglected on other Orthodox sites, but the sky is the limit here!