TDL Regions Guide: Making a blog post

Members of the TDL community can easily share their resources, insights and news through the blog. Posting to the blog is easy. You can watch this video:

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Here are the steps: 

• Become a member of the TDL space by joining. Once you are a member, you have permission to post new material to the site. Your posts are not "moderated". That means no one needs to approve your post before you publish to the web. Once you publish, the public (not just members of the TDL community) can see what you have written. You can easily edit or delete your post. We'll explain below. 
  
• Enter (login to) the space as a member. Each time you come to the space (tdlregions.net), you need to enter the space as a member in order to add content to the space. Click the "Login" button in the upper right hand corner of the space. Your user name is your e-mail address. Your password is your password. If you have trouble logging into the space, simple e-mail Brian Sykora and he can help you. 
  

• Go to the blog section of the web site by clicking on the Blog tab. Our collaborative space has a number of different sections. The blog section of the website keeps track of news. Think of it as a newspaper. The most recent posts appear at the top of the page. One of the major advantages of a blog is that it catches information as it occurs to us. We can later retrieve or filter our information by using a powerful feature of categories and tags. We will explain categories and tags below. For now, move to the blog section by clicking on the Blog tab. 
  

• Click on the New Article button to start writing. As soon as you click on the New Article button, a page will appear that looks very much like a word processing  program. 

• Start writing. There's a headline (or Title) space where you put the title of your article. Below, you'll see a big white space where you can start typing. You can use the formatting buttons in the toolbar, if you like. But at this stage don't worry too much about formatting.

• Click the Save button to save your post. Clicking the Save button publishes your post to the weblog. Now everyone can see your thoughts. 

• Edit your post by clicking on the headline. If you do not like what you see, you can always edit your blog post. To start the editing process, simply click on the headline. That brings you back to the Edit ("word processing") screen where you can edit your post, or change your headline. 
• Add links to your article by clicking on the "Insert Link" button. The real power of blogs comes in liking your readers to information of all sorts -- other web pages, files that you upload, videos, audio files, and so on. Our DTL space can accommodate all sorts of different information. For now, we'll focus on two types of common links: 
• Linking to another web page: 
• Highlight the text where you want the link to go. 
• Click on the Insert Link button in the tool bar. A light brown box will pop-up. 
• Click on the Insert a link...to a URL or bookmark. 
• Then type the URL (including the http://...) in the blank. 
  
• Click the Insert button in the lower right corner.
  
• Linking to an e-mail address: 
• Highlight the text where you want the link to go. 
• Click on the Insert Link button in the tool bar. 
• A light brown box will pop-up. 
• Click on the Insert a link...to a special place. 
• Click on the top button where the e-mail address goes. (By default this space shows your e-mail address, but you can change it to any e-mail address.) 
• Click the Insert button in the lower right corner. 

Click on the Insert Link button

Click on the URL button and insert a web address

Click on "a special place",then push the button for e-mail and insert an address

• Delete your article for a "do-over". If you are not too impressed with what you have come up with and you want to start over, you can always delete your article. Just click on the headline to get to the Edit page. Then click on the small Delete button. 

• Categorize and tag you post. We won't get into this feature too deeply, but Categories and Tags help us all organize the information we are adding to the space. Don't worry about Categorizing and Tagging your post. The most important step is to to share some insights or resources with others in the TDL community. 
• Categories are like the main chapter headings of a book. They are stable and they focus on the major chunks of information that do not change. 
• Tags are more numerous and flexible. Think of Tags as the entries in the index in the back of the book.  bee see you are and you know you and you will see isee is