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What is a weblog or 'blog'?

A weblog is best described as an online writing tool initially used by writers wanting to publish their material in a easy and consistent manner via the Internet, thus avoiding the constraints of print media. Since then weblogs have evolved allowing the average internet user to create diaries, critical analyses, photo journals and more. The term weblog is a combination of 'web' and 'log' and is often further abbreviated as 'blog' and the act of writing as 'blogging'. There are various software programs and web interfaces on the internet to facilitate blogging. Allegheny College has installed and setup the Movable Type system for the student body and faculty to use.

User setup and configuration

Note: Students and employees that wish to have a weblog first need to request a webpub account. A webpub account is necessary as your weblog needs space on a web server to display the entries you create in Movable Type. Once you receive the email confirming your webpub account, request your weblog. If you only wish to be added as an author to an existing blog you do not need to request a webpub account. Use this form to request that you be added as an author to an existing blog.

1. First bookmark the following link in your browsers favorites and proceed to the page http://blog.allegheny.edu

2.At the login screen enter your user id and password. Do not check 'Remember me?' since you will be changing your generic password with your own secure one. You may check this box in the future but keep in mind that you will want to do so on a non-public computer.

3. After entering in your user id and password you are taken to the Movable Type main menu (fig. 1.1). It is within this window that you are given access to editing your profile, managing your weblog and creating a new entry. At this point click on your username in the upper right hand corner of the screen so that you can change your default password and edit your profile.

(fig. 1.1)

4. In the 'Edit Your Profile' window enter in your personal information.

4a. Create a new password and write it down some place safe.

4b. Create a password hint to help you recover your password if you forget it and write that down some place safe.

4c. IT IS NOT RECOMMEND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR USERNAME! If you change your username it is difficult for Computing Services to recover your username and password if you forget it. PLEASE NEVER CHANGE YOUR USERNAME!

4d. Click Save Changes and after receiving confirmation that the changes have been made click on 'Menu' found at the top to return to the Main Menu (fig. 1.1).

Creating a weblog post

5. While at the Main Menu (fig. 1.1) click on 'Create a new entry on this weblog' located just to the right of your weblog's title. This will take you to the 'Create New Entry' page (fig. 1.2) where you can begin writing your weblog entry.

(fig 1.2)

6. Here in the 'Create New Entry' window you can enter in your content. You can change the default options for new posts for many of these options. Here is a break down of the various fields. You can customize the fields displayed by default to show only the fields that you regularly use.

• Title: Rather self explanatory, here you will enter in a short name for your blog entry.
• Primary Category: Used when you want to organize your weblog into categories for easy referencing in your archive. Let's say that your weblog examines the countries of East Europe. You could organize your weblog entries by country such as Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, etc.
• Entry Body: You will enter in your main content into this field. You can format your work by highlighting a word(s) and select one of the formatting options. will bold your selection, will italicize and will underline. will allow you to create a hyperlink for selected text. This link can be to another page on your home site or to any URL on the Internet. If you are familiar with HTML tags then you can choose to format your entries freestyle. You are limited to the following tags; a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ul, li, and blockquote.
• Extended Entry: This is helpful when you have an extraordinarily long entry and need to break it up or have referencing material that is best separated from the main content. The idea behind this is simple. When you create your main blog page having long entries might deter your visitors from reading more content or that particular entry is of no interest. By using the 'Extended Entry' visitors will be given the choice to continue readying the entry on a separate page or ignore it and read the next weblog entry.
• Excerpt: Used when you have a page that just shows a line or two of your blog entry. By default Moveable Type uses the first 40 words of entry. You can override this by choosing what the excerpt should look like. This is not a feature that a majority of people use.
• Post Status: You can use this to either post your weblog entry immediately when you press the save button, save it to publish in the future, or schedule it to be published a later time.
• Text Formatting: This affects the spacing in between paragraphs of your weblog entry. You want to leave this at its current setting unless you are editing your entry with HTML tags. Experiment with both settings to find which one works best for you.
• Allow Comments: This setting allows you to turn on or off the ability for visitors to comment on your weblog entry
• Allow Pings and URLs to Ping: Pinging, also known as trackbacks native to Movable Type, is an advanced method of commenting or notifying between two separate weblogs. This is handy when you want to comment on another persons weblog entry but want to do it by posting on your personal weblog. For more information on trackbacks view 'A Beginner 's Guide to TrackBack' on the Moveable Type web site. Trackbacks are not enabled on all weblogs.

Changing the Look of Your Weblog

By default your weblog has a standard template set up for you along with a style sheet so you don't have to change any of these settings for your weblog to work "out of the box" so to speak. If you do wish to have different look than the standard layout you have two options.

• Create your own custom template and style sheet. If you are familiar with html or cascading style sheets you can change your default templates to your own liking. Do not directly edit the pages created by the weblog system since your changes would be erased the next time you blogged. The pages are dynamically created by Movable Type and then placed in your webpub directory.
• For those not comfortable editing code your best option is to select a design style from the Stylecatcher plugin. There are many options to choose from whether it is reserved or wild.

7. No matter which option you choose you start changing the look of your weblog by clicking on the 'Templates' link next to your weblog name (fig. 1.1 step -7). You will then be taken to the 'Index Templates' where you will then click on the template name that you wish to edit (fig 1.3 - option 1). Remember that you can avoid editing code by clicking the 'Select a Design Using StyleCatcher' link (fig 1.3 - option 2) and select from a list of preloaded templates.

(fig. 1.3)

8. You are now in the 'List Templates' menu where you will notice a selection of different templates. For beginners you primarily want to pay attention to the main and master archive indexes along with the individual entry archive templates. Click on anyone of these template names and directly edit the HTML or use an editor such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage and then paste your finished work into the template window. Please be aware that Movable Type uses very specific tags in order to build your weblog. Our advice is that you use the standard template as a starting point and building your page around it. As you become more experienced you will learn how to incorporate the Movable Type tags into your web pages. If you completely botch a template that you didn't back up you can download the original template from Movable Type.

Backing Up Your Blog

Imagine having created a years worth of blog entries and accidentally erase everything in your webpub folder. Good news is that you can back up your weblog, here's how.

9. Following the instructions in step 8 you will create a new template by clicking on the text link 'Create new index template'. You will then enter in the following information.

• For Template Name you will enter in 'backup'.
• For Output File you will enter in 'backup.txt'.
• Make sure that 'Rebuild this template...' is checked.
• Leave 'link this template to a file' blank.
• For template body open this file (backup.txt) and cut and paste it's contents into the window.

Now every time you post a new entry this backup file will be created and recreated in your weblog folder with the title backup.txt. It is up to you to manually download it to your desktop computer from your webpub account on a regular basis using a ftp program. Depending on how often you blog and your tolerance for losing this information will determine how often you backup your weblog.

Conclusion and Resources

Obviously we haven't covered every single feature that Movable Type offers but this tutorial will get you by without much problems. We highly recommend reading the complete user manual from Movable Type since not every feature has been explained here. If you want to explore other features of Movable Type or want to learn more about what is out there, here is a list of recommended readings on the Internet;

Movable Type - http://www.movabletype.org

Audblog - http://www.audblog.com

blog <styles> - http://www.blogstyles.com