Murdoch University Blogs

Settings

Your first stop after getting your blog (congratulations by the way ) should be the Settings tab. There are many different things you can change about how your blog will behave. It is worth poking about to find which options fine tune your blog so it does exactly what you want it to.

Below are the most common options that you should know about.

THE SETTINGS TAB

To get to the settings, click on the Settings tab. When you do so, you will have the option to go to individual pages containing settings for the following options.

• General
• Writing
• Reading
• Discussion
• Media
• Privacy
• Permalinks
• Miscellaneous
• Delete Blog
• Content License
• Admin Bar
• AMP (Anarchy Media Player)

Please note: the screenshots below are for an earlier version of the software, but the options are the same.

GENERAL

Settings to know about:

Blog Title. Technically you can change this as often as you want. This will not change the URL (address) of your blog. Please consider your readers and people who might want to cite your blog and don’t do it too often.

Tagline. This describes what your blog is about. It appears in most themes but not all. Technically you can change this as often as you want.

Membership. If you tick “Users must be logged in and registered to comment” then during the pilot project this would restrict comments to only Murdoch Staff with a MAIS login. There are better ways to control comments than ticking this.

Timezone This defaults to UTC +8 hours (Perth time). If timestamps on your posts look odd, this is where you would change it.

READING

Settings to know about:

Front page displays If you want the same content to display on the first page of your blog, regardless of any new posts, select a static page. Murdoch Blogs is set up so the Welcome page always displays when you first get to the site.

DISCUSSION

Settings to know about:

Email me whenever If you are moderating all comments, it is a good idea to set this to tell you when there is a new comment. If you are not moderating every comment, it is still very useful to know immediately what people are saying on your blog.

Before a comment appears

If you chose that an administrator must approve all comments, then ensure that you do so in a timely way if you want to promote trust and conversation from your readers.

Regardless of how you are moderating comments, it is always a good idea to ask for name and email address. This does not stop someone from entering something made up like “me@noemail.com”.

A very nice compromise on checking each comment is to allow automatic comments from people only if you have checked an approved their first ever comment on your site. If you have this enabled and suspect that someone is a spammer, you can check any link back to a website, or email them at their email address to ensure they are legitimate.

Murdoch Blogs has a spam filter enabled which may sometimes let spam comments through. It may also stop a few legitimate comments. If someone complains about this, please contact bloghelp@murdoch.edu.au .

PRIVACY

Settings to know about:

** If you don’t want your blog to display in the sidebar of the main blog where it lists blogs in the project, please select the second option. Think before you do, as this will mean your content is not searched by search engines like Google ***

First option - everyone plus searchengines can see your blog

Second option - everyone except search engines can see your blog

Third option - for the pilot project,the “blog community” includes only Murdoch staff with MAIS access, plus all library staff and anyone who authors a blog in the project.

Fourth option - only the blog owner can approve a request to be a blog subscriber, which just means “someone who is allowed to read the blog, but not write to it”. People from the “blog community” can request to become a subscriber by (***mechanism to come***). This should not be confused with an RSS subscriber, which is something completely different.

Fifth option - only people with admin access can get to the blog

OTHER TABS

You can fiddle with most other options without breaking your blog. Do not play with the “Delete Blog” tab unless you really intend to get rid of your blog permanently and never, ever want to reuse the blog URL.