Welcome to the Exciting Blog Tool: WordPress!
version May 2012
By Dr. Eileen Dittmar emdittmar@gmail.com
MS Word document of this pagewordpress-5-2012
Title: Blogging Today for Tomorrow’s Professionals
Presentation Description: WordPress offers a free blogging space with sophisticated features that once were only available with enhanced websites. Now you can quickly create a web space with pages, documents, posts, and comments. You can easily add widgets, adjust the appearance, and share. WordPress is perfect for sharing your biography; also great for topics of interest to others.
What is WordPress?
WordPress http://wordpress.com
WordPress.com is brought to the public for free by some of the same folks who work on the open source blogging software available at WordPress.org. Open source WordPress has been incredibly successful and risen from a handful of users to the most-used blog tool in its category. Their goal was to bring the WordPress experience to a larger audience. That is what WordPress.com offers with a hosted version of the open source package where you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge. For teachers: Create a WordPress blog for your classes, or one for each class, or one for each subject. For students: Assign students to create a WordPress blog as a class project where items are added over the semester.
Demonstration
A show of creating, editing, uploading to a WordPress blog; a show of dashboard and navigation.
Tutorials
http://en.support.wordpress.com/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/get-started/
Examples
https://eileendittmar.wordpress.com
http://mobilelearningtips.wordpress.com
http://hollymccracken.wordpress.com
Want more examples? View “freshly pressed” for ideas.
Features
http://en.wordpress.com/features/
Refer to the features page often until you are comfortable with them.
Let’s open an account and create your blog
Follow the prompts from wordpress.com to create an account with your name. Keep track of the email address, user name, and password that you entered. Ignore fee-based services.
Add a post entitled About Me (it can easily be changed later if needed)
Add five pages; for now let’s name them Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5 (page titles can easily be changed)
Explore Dashboard
Hint: Have one browser logged into WordPress and another as a visitor.
Appearance, Settings, Widgets.
Edit slugs
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