About Blogging : For Teachers – Part 3(b) of 10

When posting, it helps to categorise the post. In the sidebar, to the right of your post, are the category options. By default, there is only one category called ‘uncategorised’.

To create a category, click the ‘+ Add New Category’ link and add a category for your post.

They’re quite useful and can come in handy with site searches, indexing content and user-engagement. Try using the same phrases or key words that are relevant to the content and repeat them in other related posts too.

The Tags options are also available on the hand side of your post while editing.

• Leave out irrelevant words such as “of, or, with, and etc..”
• Use useful names that people might search for eg. Life Science Resources
• Be consistent in naming conventions
• Don’t ‘over-tag’ your posts with too many tags or categories
• Try use tags that will link related content eg. ‘Grade 12’ on any post that relates to Grade 12 users/teachers

You can allow people to comment on posts and pages that you create. There are a number of reasons why you would allow commenting and just as many for not allowing commenting.

For

• Engage your readers
• Allow for discussion on topics/posts
• Have questions and answers happen in real-time on your blog

Against

• Comment spam with links to questionable sites
• Users taking advantage and deviating from the topic of the post to push their opinions
• Fake comments that seem almost real, complimenting your post/blog but deceptively throwing in a link to a spam web site

You can, however, allow comments to be moderated before they are publicly posted. Access this option via the Settings / Discussion options in the Dashboard sidebar. I suggest enabling these options to protect your blog and content.

To go to the Widgets page, navigate (from your Dashboard) to Appearance – Widgets.

There are MANY widgets available with a drag-and-drop interface. Depending on the WordPress theme you have chosen for your site, you may have more than one location to place a widget.

Simply drag the widgets you’d like to use to a container on the right. Some widgets have customisable options too like the Recent Posts widget.

Here you can see I have added a bunch of widgets to the main sidebar:

Here you can see the widgets in action on the live blog:

Here you can specify the name and tag-line for your blog. These are important as search engines will index these before looking at your content.

Here I have added some information:

And the live version where you can see the Site title and Description being displayed:

We have looked at comments already in the ‘comments‘ section above.

When creating a post, look at the ‘Publish’ box on the right of your post. Click ‘Visibility’ and select ‘password protected’. Enter in a password. Publish when ready.

The end result is this: