This could be handy for students when researching topics or for those on the refdesk that have similar queries:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Have fun

PART A - GET A BLOG

1. Decide whether your blog should be part of Murdoch Blogs.

2. Think about the decisions to make before you get a new blog .

3. Decide the web address for the blog.

This will be in the form http://blogs.murdoch.edu.au/yourblogname . Choose carefully because this cannot be changed and it cannot be re-used, even after you delete your blog.

4. Decide the name of your blog and the tagline (eg. Murdoch University Blogs: blogs for Murdoch University staff and students)

5. Click on the “Get a blog” button on the sidebar.

This video shows you how to get a blog, How to get a blog at blogs.murdoch.edu.au .

PART B - FINISH SETTING UP

6. Alter the settings for your blog,  to decide things like who can see your blog, how you will deal with comments and the time zone.

7. Decide on the way your blog will look - the theme.

8. Change or delete the default post, page and comment - unless you want your first post to say “Hello World!”.

This video shows you how to personalise your blog, Personalising your blog on blogs.murdoch.edu.au.

PART C - CUSTOMISE AND PERSONALISE

8. Add an image you create to the top of the blog if you want to.

9. Add some widgets to the sidebar - like a search box, a list of posts, a list of categories - to make your content more findable.

10. Activate plugins to add functions like statistics, email subscription to comments and the ability to search and insert photos from Flickr.

11. Add some content by creating your first pages or posts

WHEN NOT TO BLOG WITH MURDOCH BLOGS

1. Your blog is not just work/study related
2. You want ownership of it and to take it when you leave campus
3. You want to use the blog for “personal branding”.
4. The site is a “throw away” single use collaboration and you don’t mind the data being stored on a third party server
5. You want to share access with someone without a MAIS login
6. You want to customize the look and features more than the university can provide.

WHEN TO BLOG WITH MURDOCH BLOGS

1. You are required to use a blog as part of your job/study
2. Your data needs to be on University servers for ethical or business reasons
3. If the intellectual property created belongs to the university
4. If it is essential to have a murdoch.edu.au web address
5. If students need to access it without using up internet QUOTA
6. If you don’t have the skill or time to evaluate third party hosting options
7. You want to set it so that only someone with a MAIS login can read it
8. You want to use your MAIS login to access it
9. You want a system that *may* be able to integrate with other information systems of the University
10. The blog is not based on a specific Course Unit and the very basic blog facility of the Learning Management System is not sufficient
11. You are concerned about Terms of Service on third party sites

HOSTING OPTIONS

There are three places to host your blog:

1. On a third party “get a blog” service where blogs are set up and  maintained on a web site. These are good for the beginner blogger. You can make quite a few changes to the look and functions of the blog, but generally these more limited than if you hosted the blog yourself.

Useful sites to get a blog are:

• blogger
• wordpress.com
• edublogs.org

2. Buy web hosting and control your own installation. This is useful if you want to control all your data and customise your blog intricately. Many hosting services cost around $100 a year and have “one click” installations for blogs. You do have to have some technical knowledge.

3. Have your blog hosted by the University as part of Murdoch University blogs.

1. What’s the blog for? Saying that you are going to blog is like saying that you are going to write - without knowing the purpose for the writing, or blog, you won’t get very far.
2. What would make your blog successful to you ? Lots of hits? Lots of comments? Just remembering to write in it? Recording useful ideas?
3. How much time do you have for it ?
4. Who is your audience?
5. Do you want to be part of a conversation?
6. What will you do about comments? Do you want to moderate the before or after they are published on your blog? Do you have time to moderate them in a timely way?
7. How formal will your voice be ?
8. Will you have a personalised image at the top ?
9. Will you have a publishing schedule ?
10. What will be your blog’s name and  tagline ?
11. Would you read your own blog ? Is it interesting enough to engage you?
12. What will be your policy on your own privacy and  others’ privacy?

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.

You can choose from over 80 different themes or “looks” for your blog, already preloaded onto Murdoch Blogs. Many of them allow you to upload an image from your PC to use as the header image. If you have not used widgets to specify what goes on the sidebar, each theme comes with different things on the sidebar as a default.

You can change your theme at the click of a mouse, then change it back again instantly. If you do not choose a theme, your blog will look like this:

MURDOCH THEMES

There are three Murdoch based themes that you can choose for your blog. These have been approved by Corporate Communications and Public Relations .

Murdoch Corporate - standard corporate look

Murdoch Ripped - uses the “ripped paper” look

Murdoch Plain - allows for very long titles and taglines. Logo is in the footer instead of the header.

OTHER THEMES

You are welcome to choose from the other themes included. Some of them were designed with a particular kind of blog content in mind, for example a newsletter, or forum-like comment sharing site.

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR THEME

Go to the Appearance Tab:

This defaults to the Themes tab.  Scroll down to find a blog design you like and double click on it.

Choose “Visit Site” to see what the change looks like. When you are selecting themes, it is helpful to right click on “View Site” and open the page in a different window or tab. That way you can keep the “Themes” tab on your screen and just reload the other window/tab after you have changed the theme.

If the theme is one that allows this, then a tab called “Custom image header” will appear under the Appearance tab.

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

Step 1. - Browse to choose the image from your PC.

Step 2. Crop the image to the required size.

3. Delight in your cleverness

The blog sidebar usually contains the same information, no matter which page or post of the blog is displayed. This is a very useful way to provide tools to help the user navigate around your blog,  like search boxes or a list of archives. You can also put in information like links to recent posts or the text of recent comments.

Commonly there is just one sidebar on either the right or left hand side.  The sidebar location is set by the theme you choose for your blog. Some themes have sidebars on both sides of the content. Some themes have sidebars at the bottom. One theme available in the project has six sidebars.

WIDGETS

Each theme has by default different information in the sidebar. Some have calendars while some have blogrolls (a list of other blogs that the blogger thinks are worth reading). What do you do when you have found the perfect theme, but you want different information on the sidebar? That’s where widgets come in.

Widgets are modular “building bricks” of information that you can mix and match on a sidebar. You don’t have to know HTML to change the sidebar of your theme around - just grab a widget, move it up or down the sidebar and you have changed what is displaying.

HOW TO ADD A WIDGET

Most blog themes in the Murdoch Blogs project have widgets. If they are widegetised, then a “Widgets” option will appear under the “Appearance” tab:

Widgets

The screenshot below shows a blog with no widgets activated.

Here is the same blog where the blog owner has used the “add” button to add widgets to the sidebar, then dragged and dropped the added widgets to put them in the order she wanted. She’s remembered to select “Save Changes” when the she had the widgets she wanted and in the right order.

Here is what the settings under the “Widgets” tab look like. As you can see, the owner has added:

• Links to all Pages in the blog
• A Calendar that users can click on to retrieve all posts from a particular day
• A list of Recent Posts
• A Text box containing a Twitter badge

Please note: the screenshots below are for a slightly different, earlier version of the software. The options are exactly the same.

USING TEXT WIDGETS AND BADGE WIDGETS TO MAKE  YOUR SIDEBAR EVEN MORE FLEXIBLE

Sites like Flickr (photos), Twitter (microblogging) and Meebo (federated IM) have tools and “badges” made to go on the sidebars of blogs. Typically, you select the colour and look of your badge, choose a few options to make it do different things, press a button and you are given “embed code”.The embed code is a string of characters that you copy and paste somewhere in your blog. The badge you have chosen automagically appears.

For many of these badges, the embed code can be entered in a text widget in Wordpress Mu to produce a badge on the sidebar.

Any data that is pulled from a site outside of the university will be charged on student’s QUOTA account, while the rest of the blog content will not. It will also not be visible to people only accessing the PARNET network (eg. on the fast track PCs in the library).

AN EXAMPLE: ADDING A TWITTER BADGE USING A TEXT WIDGET

I have a Twitter account that I update daily so people know where to find me on campus. Twitter allows me to create a twitter badge , and will give me some code to embed in a widget.

Here’s how I can embed a little badge in the sidebar of my blog to update people about where I am:

1. Go to the Twitter “get a badge” page .

2. Change the colours and size of the badge using the options, then copy the code that the site gives.

3. Go to Appearance  > Widgets and add a Text widget to your sidebar. Select “Save changes” now or it won’t work.

4. Add a short title to the text box and paste the HTML into the body of text box. It will look something like this:

5. Select “Change” and then “Save Changes”. When you look at the blog, it now has the badge added to the sidebar, like this:

AN EXAMPLE: ADDING A GOOGLE TRANSLATOR BUTTON USING THE BADGE WIDGET

Here’s how to add a button to your sidebar that will instantly translate the contents of your blog to around 10 different languages.

1. Go to the Google Translate Tools page: http://translate.google.com/translate_tools?hl=en

2. Copy the relevant HTML where indicated on the page.

3. Go to Appearance > Widgets and add aText Widget to your sidebar. Select “Save changes” now or it won’t work.

4. Add a short title to the text box and paste the HTML into the body of text box. It will look something like this:

5. Select Change at the bottom of the text box, and then select “save changes”. The sidebar of the blog, will now look like this. You can then drop down the box to translate the blog.

Some extra features (plugins) are switched on for all blogs. Some plugins you need to switch on to use.

There is a list of other possible plugins at the WPMUDEV site. If your blog isn’t doing everything you want it to, then you may find an appropriate plugin on the list and request that we install it.

PLUGINS ENABLED FOR ALL BLOGS

More privacy options

This adds three new options under the Settings > Privacy Tab. They are explained in the information about Settings . Here is a link to information about the More Privacy Options plugin from the plugin authors.

WYSIWYG print

This makes any page you print out look more or less like it did on the screen of your browser. Here is a link to information about the WYSISYG  plugin from the plugin authors.

Anarchy media player

This inserts a media player into your post when you link to an audio or video file ( *not* a video sharing site). This is highly customisable. Here is a link to information about the Anarchy Media Player plugin from the plugin authors.

Allow embedded videos

This lets you use the embed code from sites like YouTube and Slideshare to embed media into your blog posts. Just copy the code from the site under the “code” tab when you write your post. Here is a link to information about the Allow Embedded Videos plugin from the plugin authors.

Akismet

This stops spam comments or pingbacks from being added to your blog posts. *Sometimes* people with legitimate comments are blocked, especially if their email account is from a site where people are know to send spam. Here is a link to information about the Akismet plugin from the plugin authors.

PLUGINS YOU CAN SWITCH ON IF YOU WANT TO

You will need to enable these plugins using the plugins screen if you want to use them.

Here’s how to get to the Plugins screen:

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

To enable a plugin, click on the word “activate” on the right hand column. The plugin will be switched on and the work “activate” changed to “deactivate”. To disable the plugin, click on the word “deactivate”.

The image below shows no plugins activated:

Once you have activated a plugin, you will need to set its options. The options page appears under the Settings tab only after the plugin has been activated.

Add RSS

When web browsers detect an RSS feed on any page on the web, a small RSS icon appears in the address bar. Users can click on this to add the RSS feed to their browser bokmarks. This plugin lets you add other feeds to the list of autodetected feeds, for example the RSS feed fir library new books in a subject area.

Add Firestats

This records non-identifying information about people who view your blog, like which URL referred them, which country they are from, their domain and the type of browser they used. This information lets you know whether you are reaching your target audience. Statistics are only recorded for posts published *after* the plugin is enabled.

Photo dropper

This adds an extra search box on your “Write post” screen. It searches Flickr and retrieves images released under Creative Commons. You can then click on S, M or L to automatically insert a small, medium or large image into your blog post, including attribution.

Sociable

This adds a number of icons to the bottom of all your posts. If users click on these, then it adds your post to their account at a corresponding Social Networking site. You determine which icons are offered via the options page.

Spam Karma 2

This adds extra Anti-spam protection to your blog. When you first enable the plugin you will see a pink line at the top of your page with a request that you click on the link to visit the SpamKarma options page. Click on the link and be taken to the configuration page, do nothing more and then go about your business, just a little more spam free than you once were. You will get regular email messages from Spam Karma telling you what is happening with your blog.

Subscribe to Comments

This adds a check box at the bottom of the screen where people can comment on your post. If they check this, then they will be emailed every time someone else makes a comment on this post. Commenters with this set up for your blog can later change their email address details using a link at the bottom of the page.

Wordpress video plugin

This lets you embed media items from other sites. Most of the time, the site-wide “Allow embedded videos” plugin will work. If for some reason it does not, then enable this plugin and go to the instructions page to see how to embed the media.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and also add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings along with thumbs based ratings.

This guide to the dashboard shows a number of useful features.

You can also find a host of useful screencasts at wordpress.tv .

I have recorded the audio of the session and am working on synchronising this with the slides. The screenshots in the slides are slightly different to the current interface used for Murdoch Blogs.

You can listen to the audio by clicking on the “Audio MP3″ symbol Blogging at Murdoch University: What, why and naked hamsters .

(Nothing displays as the slides load, which may take a little while)