Greenstone Blogging Instructions and Style Guide

Instructions for blogging on the greenstone.org website. = Foreword = The Greenstone blog is for members of the Greenstone team to make announcements. If this is not you, and you wish to write blog posts to be seen by Greenstone users, consider setting up your own blog and giving us the RSS URL. We will display your blog posts on planet.greenstone.org.

The blog administrator is Oran ([mailto:oranfry@cs.waikato.ac.nz oranfry@cs.waikato.ac.nz]).

= Step A - Log in to http://www.greenstone.org/wordpress/wp-admin = This is the base URL of the wordpress blog admin section. A number of pages exist here for administering the blog.

If you are not registered already, see the blog administrator to get a username and password.

If you have forgotten you password but remember your username and email address, use wordpress' 'Lost your password?' function. If you have forgotten your username or email address, please email the blog administrator.

The first time you make a post to the blog, you should set up your profile. After logging in, click 'My Profile' in the top right-hand corner of the screen. The minimum to customize is:
 * Your first and last name, and your display name. These are used for signing your posts.

= Step B - Click the 'Write' tab and write = When writing blog posts, in order to keep the blog tidy and consistent it is essential that you do the following:

Post Titles
Always give the post a suitable title - not too long please!

The Post Body
Always add at least some text to the post body. Please cross-reference where appropriate. If you use the name of an organization, software package, another website or section of a website, or even an idea, it is a good idea to make that name a hyperlink to an appropriate page on the internet.

Categories
Always put the post in at least one category. This makes your post available in the blog category archives.

Your post will automatically appear in the sidebar of http://www.greenstone.org/

Post Excerpts
The post excerpt is a short summary of your post which can be displayed where it is not appropriate to display the full text of the post. Excerpts are used on the sidebar of the greenstone.org website and on the homepage of the blog. Please write the post excerpt explicitly - don't rely on wordpress to excerpt you post for you as it may do a terrible job! (Wordpress will strip hyperlinks and other formatting from the excerpt, and make the excerpt too long.) I usually copy the first few lines of my post directly from the post box to the excerpt box. The excerpt box can be found quite far down the 'write' page, under the file upload box.

Post Slugs
The post 'slug' is a character string which identifies the post. Dealing with string IDs (slugs) makes for prettier and more self explanatory URLs than dealing with numeric IDs - www.greenstone.org/blog/2007-01-15/greenstone-history/ looks better that www.greenstone.org/blog/single.php?id=10. If you do not specify a post slug, one is automatically generated from the post title. If your post title has special characters in it, specify a post slug with no special characters in it (only alphanumeric chars and hyphens). This keeps URLs pretty by avoiding ugly URL character encoding where, for example, 'Niccolò' becomes 'Niccol%C3%B2'

= Step C - Click 'Publish' =

Click 'publish' to submit your post. It can be viewed at http://www.greenstone.org/blog.