Lesson 9: Six ways to show your story (and how to print all about Heidi on the screen)

You might have had a look at the stats section of the dashboard and wondered why some stories of this blog have not been read more than a couple of times, although you are sure there are more readers.

The explanation is that the same stories appear on several pages of the blog. On this blog every post (story) is published on six pages (actually on more):

On the first page
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/
as long until it is story #8 (This blog now shows seven newest stories on first page, but that can be changed) Then the story will be moved to page 2 which at the moment is:
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/search?updated-max=2014-04-07T13:33:00%2B03:00&max-results=7

Blogger stats are informative, but the report of the page-views of each
individual story is misleading showing only views when only the post
in question was shown alone on its own page.

Every page has its own page. It is these exclusive visits on the page the statistics show. You can copy the link of the story page and put it on a web page or send by email. The page URL of my story: Lesson 4 - Using Google Groups is:
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/2014/03/lesson-4-using-google-groups.html

On this blog the posts are archived month by month. Thus every story posted in March this year are to be found and read at:
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/2014_03_01_archive.html

Actually a page of stories each year is also generated. The following link shows all 2014 stories in sets of seven posts:
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/search?updated-min=2014-01-01T00:00:00%2B02:00&updated-max=2015-01-01T00:00:00%2B02:00&max-results=50

For every label a page is generated. If you want to see all the lessons of this blog on one single page, go to:
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/search/label/Lesson

Our blog has a global audience ;-)

Every search typed in the search box upper left corner of the blog generates a page if stories including the search term are found. If you want to find all stories mentioning the noblest of all arts - football - you type football in the search box and generate this web page:
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/search?q=football

If you appear often on a group blog, you can also generate a page with all the stories you have written or beem mentioned on. Here's our Heidi on the Art&Media blog:
http://tamk-artmedia.blogspot.fi/search?q=m%C3%A4enp%C3%A4%C3%A4

The pages also have their own URL:s  like:
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/p/library.html

Lesson 8: Rebelling software

How to restore order?

Sometimes you might get really frustrated with software not working properly. You do everything right but things are not happening the way they should, You double check everything, do everything right and no result.

One of the most popular annoying situations with Blogger is that pics don’t appear where they should. You put the cursor where you want the pic, use the add image function, and the photo pops up on top of the story. You start moving the pic and create a mess. You start everything again and no positive feedback to your effort.

The way to address this problem is to close the post, then open it again, and it works.

On every course I use Blogger there is at least one student who can’t access the dashboard in the beginning by accepting the invitation. The fix is in most cases that the user logs out from Google, then logs in again. Then everything works fine.

Logging out and in again is also the fix if you are not able to see the edit button of a page to add content. This happened to one of the students of this course last week. You can find more details about this in our Google Group.

A general rule for putting all rebelling cloud software to order is to shut down the situation and start again - exactly like restarting the PC is most often best way to manage the computer.

Lesson 2b - Quick note: the labels

I realised my blog instructions were not appropriate. In my instructions for Assignment 1 I advised:
"Please label your introduction "Introduction""

"Label" needs some explanation: It is not the title of the story but a tag used to identify similar posts, stories connected together by some criteria.

You can see the given labels below the post

You can get the idea behind labelling on top right of our blog: labels are used to create links to filter certain kind of stories. So far we use Assignment, Lesson and Introduction for introductions of course participants.

Labels are like hash tags on Twitter!

Screenshot: Quick Links on our blog

How to add labels?

When you edit your story, you can add labels clicking on "Labels" under the title Post Settings. You can click required labels below the input box, or create new ones by typing them in the box. Remember to separate the labels by commas.

Here you choose labels and create new ones!

Lesson 2: Start posting!

Blogger is very easy to use. After publishing a couple of posts you feel like a pro. Here's some tips though:

• on the home page/dashboard you can make draft.blogger.com your default page and choose your preferred language
• there is a tool bar above the area where you type text (but the title of your story is typed above the tool bar). Move your mouse cursor above the icons and you see what they are good for
• on the left side of the tool bar you can choose between two different working modes; in the Compose  mode you work like with any advanced text processor, use toolbar icons for different activities; in the HTML mode you use HTML tags to control output.
• There is the insert a video icon for uploading or inserting YouTube videos. If you want to embed e.g. Vimeo video, then copy the code from the Vimeo page, swich to HTML mode in blogger editor, paste the code and switch back to Compose mode. (This is the only way I have found to embed Vimeo, if you know a better way please share your wisdom.)
• the blog is so far hidden. You can see it only when logged in on Blogger/Google. We will make the blog visible to all after a couple of weeks
• don't be afraid of making mistakes. If you make a mistake writing for print media or giving a video interview, your mistake is irreversible. The nice thing about on-line publishing is that you can edit and correct whenever you want to.
• after you have posted you first image, a Google+ album will be created for you automatically. 

This is a caption. The photo is a screenshot from my
on line Picasa albums

If you have any questions about using Blogger you can publish your questions as comments to this post. Other students are welcome to answer, I will also do.

If you want to contribute by sharing your knowledge about blogging dealing with some specific topic you are welcome to publish an independent post about it.