Categories: FNWiki | FN Blog Manual

This page was last modified 20:40, 10 June 2008.

From Forum Nokia Wiki

Overview

The simplistic walk-through for creating a blog entry has been described in the Getting Started section. In this section more detailed information on managing the entries in your blogs is provided.

In basic terms you can start a new blog entry, save an entry as a draft (without publishing it), browse existing entries (both drafts and published ones) and re-edit them, publish a blog entry, delete entries, and see some selected statistics for your entry.

One thing to keep in mind before starting a blog entry is that if you want to include some pictures, audio, or video files along your entry you need to first add those files on the blogs server as a resource (see Managing FN.com Blog resources). Of course this is not needed, if you are using images or videos served from some other server. Also you can also start a blog entry, save that as a draft and return back to editing that entry after uploading the resources to the blogs server.

Working with the blog entry list

The following screen shot show the blog entry list view (list of Posts). You can get to this view by choosing the menu option Manage->Manage Posts->Posts.

Figure 1. The UI for creating a new Blog entry

In this list some detailed information is given for each of the entries. This includes:

• Blog title and the categories it belongs to
• Publishing timestamp
• Author (this is only relevant if there are multiple authors for your blog – typically this is not the case)
• Status of the entry – one of Draft, Published, or Deleted
• Number of comments
• Number of trackbaks
• Number of views

From this list you can manage the posts through following actions

• View the blog entry in the editor window by clicking the blog entry title or clicking the edit button () on the right
• Delete the blog entry by clicking the delete button () on the right
• See the entry in the browser as the users would see it by clicking the browser button () on the right
• See the Referrer URLs for this by clicking the bar chart icon () on the right

In this view you can also select blog entries to be viewed using different criteria. This is mainly done using the drop down menus above the blog entry list, but you can also limit the entries to be listed using the category links listed below each of the blog entry title or through the search box above the blog entry list. Through the drop down menus you can select blog entries based on

• Category
• Status (Draft, Published, Deleted)
• Author (not useful, unless there are multiple authors for your blog)
• Date (a specific month or all entries independent of publishing time)

Bulk managing blog entries

The check boxes in front of the entries (in Figure 1 above) are useful for bulk managing the entries, meaning that you can do the same action for multiple blog entries at the same time. The actions available for bulk management are:

• Delete entries
• Change the status of selected entries (Draft, Published, Deleted)
• Change the category of selected entries

In order to be able to bulk manage the selected entries you need to click the Show Bulk Edit Options link above the blog entry list on the right. This adds the bulk edit options in the end of the blog entry list.

Viewing blog entry statistics

You can see a number of statistics for your blog entries in the blog entry list view pictured below. In this view you can see:

• How many comments there are for each entry (column CM)
• How many trackbacks there are for each entry (column TB)
• How many times this entry has been viewed (column Views). Note that this field does not include the views to this entry purely through a RSS/Atom feed (of course if the user navigates to this entry using the feed, then the number of views is incremented)

Figure 2. List view of blog entries for your blog

In addition you can also see where the readers end up to your blog entry (Referrer URL taken from the HTTP request headers). This list can be seen by clicking the bar graph icon () furthest right to on the post entry row. An example of this Referrer URL view is shown below.

Editing a blog entry

In this section all the screen shot references are to the Figure 1. You will enter to this page either by clicking New Post, selecting menu item Manage->Manage Posts->New Post, clicking the title of an existing blog entry on the blog entry list (the image above), clicking the edit button () on the blog entry list.

The editor window contains following components

• Title (Topic) field for the blog entry
• Slug field, which you can use to create a short easy to remember description for the entry, which will be then used to create the URL for the entry. If you do not add anything to this field, the title of the entry will be used to create the URL (and the slug too).
• Text field for editing the blog entry text. The field contains some buttons to help you to format the text better and to add some resources (like images or videos to the entry). The use of these buttons is described in <reference in here>
• Field for adding Trackback URLs
• Date field which is populated automatically by the system, but you can manually change the content of this field to force the entry to be published at a later date/time. In general, the entry will not be at all visible for readers until the publication time, unless you change the settings of your blog.
• Status drop down menu is also populated automatically. You need to worry of this menu if you want to publish a previously saved draft or delete and existing entry.
• Posted by field showing the author of the entry. This is relevant only if there are multiple authors for your blog, which is not typically the case.
• Categories attached to the entry
• Global category menu. This is used to place the entry under the category cloud on the front page of the Forum Nokia Blogs.
• Enable comments check box for disabling/enabling commenting for the entry. The default setting for this is controlled by your blog settings (by default this should be set to "Enabled")
• Notification of new comments check box for changing the setting if an email notification is sent to your email account registered with your Forum Nokia user name. The default setting for this is controlled by your blog settings (by default this should be set to “Enabled”).
• Send trackbacks check box for disabling/enabling trackbacks for the entry. The default setting for this is controlled by your blog settings.

Using the blog entry editor

This section describes how to use the buttons and links of the blog entry editor displayed in Figure 4). The descriptions below are written with the assumption that you are familiar with the basic functionality of any text editor.

While you can edit the HTML code of the blog entry directly (you can display the HTML dialog window by pressing the HTML button) the editor tools of the WYSIWYG editor text field provide you easy tools for most of the needed formatting functions. With the buttons of the field you can add things in to the blog entry, like:

• Change the font and font size (drop down menus)
• Change the font color () and background color ()
• Make the text bolded (), add italics (), underlined (), or add strikethrough () to it
• Justify the text to left (), center (), right (), or both left and right ()
• Create a bulleted () or numbered () list
• Add () or remove indentation
• Create a hyperlink () or remove an existing hyperlink (). Note that you need to select some text for these buttons to activate. Also you can define if you want the linked page to open in the same window or do you want the linked page to be opened in a new window.
• Add an emoticon (). You can choose from 16 existing emoticons.
• Add a horizontal ruler ()
• Insert date () or time () in the text
• Add a More… breakpoint to the blog entry (). There is also a link for this same functionality underneath the editor field
• Add image () by defining the image URL – and you can also control the alternative text, image alignment, size, and spacing
• Add a reference to a resource (like a video or image) uploaded on the server (). This requires that you have uploaded the file to the server earlier (described in …). This button brings up a new window where you can select the resource to be added. For images you can add the image in various formats. For videos you can add either a Flash-based video player instance for the FLV video or a direct reference to the FLV video.
• Add a video player () utilizing external video sources (like YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, iFilm, Goear, Grouper, or dailymotion).
• Add a audio player (), by providing an URL to the MP3 audio file.

But you can also:

• Toggle the editor field between normal view and full screen view ()
• View and edit the HTML code of the entry ()
• Toggle spell checker ()