Congratulations!
You're the proud owner of a brand new blog on DirTeam.
To give you a head start this blogpost provides some useful tips on making your first post, changing the look and feel of your blog, places to look for interaction with your readers and ways to write posts.
Making your first post
Your first post should be the easiest post you ever have to write, but somehow most people find it the hardest. Here's a little advice on writing your first post:
Tell something about yourself.
That's all you have to do in your first post. Since you're the expert on this matter it should be very easy! You don't have to give out really private information (no-one's interested in your password) if you don't want to, but giving some insight on the person behind the blog might make people want to read your blog.
Simply stating your name and occupation might suffice, but to make things really interesting you could write down the reason why you're blogging ("sharing information", "helping people", "doing right", "saving the world", etc) and who hooked you up on blogging.
Don't make your first post any harder than it needs to be though. If you're not sure what you're going to blog about, leave it out or keep thing globally ("I think the information you're going to find here will be Active Directory related") If you're not sure how much posts you're going to write per month, don't give any estimates. Pressuring yourself might only result on writers block.
Changing the look and feel of your blog
Homo Sapiens, compared to Homo Neanderthalensis is known for changing his surroundings to his needs.
DirTeam uses CommunityServer 2.1 at this moment. This is a versatile platform for bloggers. There's much freedom to change the look and feel of your posts. One of the most profound ways to customize the look and feel is choosing a theme and setting the Title and Description for your blog.
By default every new blog has the Default blog theme and the default name applied. You can change the default theme to any of the roughly thirty other themes available. You can change the title and description of your blog to anything you like.
To change the way your blogs looks follow the steps below:
- Log in with your DirTeam username and password on the top right corner of any DirTeam page
- A new menu item called Control Panel appears. (On your own blog the link is called My Blog Dashboard). Follow the link.
- If this is the first time you enter the DirTeam Control Panel select your blog as the blog to manage using the Select a blog to manage link under My Blog(s). Your choice is stored in your cookie.
- Under My Blog(s) follow the link called Manage 'YourBlogName'.
- On the left menu expand Global Settings.
- To change the Title and Description of your blog click on the Title, Description, and News button. To change your Title and Description type what you want it to be and press the Save button.
- To change the Theme for your blog click on the Change How My Blog Looks button. On the Skins tab choose a theme. You'll find themes in the drop down box. Selecting a screen will display a screenshot of the theme. Press Save when you've selected a theme to your liking.
- Use the Exit Control Panel and Return to Site button to return to the DirTeam website and inspect your new settings. (Applying settings may take up to 10 minutes.)
When you get bored with your blog theme you could opt to change the Background Image of your Blog Title and Description like Natasha Mocke has done. (more on that in another post soon) Another option is to write a higly customized theme from scratch like I've done. (the Unspoken theme)
Look for interaction with your readers
The Control Panel is also very useful when you want to interact with your readers. You might check on every post you write to see whether people left comments, but when you've been writing posts for a year you might lose track of certain posts and thus certain comments.
The Control Panel offers the ability to see how many readers have read a certain post, how readers reach your posts and what comments they've left behind for your amusement. This interaction is one of the most pleasurable aspects of blogging.
To see how many readers have read certain posts enter the Control Panel and Manage your blog. Click on the Manage Content menu item on the left and select All posts. The Views column tells you how many views a specific post has had in peoples browsers. The AggViews column tells you how many times a post is viewed outside of the context of DirTeam. Examples of this views are views in RSS readers.
Tip!
Looking at the posts with many views might indicate which posts are interesting to your readers. Perhaps looking more into the subject might be useful to your readers.
In the same list with All posts you can actually click on the values in the Views column. This function zooms in on the origins of the visits of the specific blog post. Using the drop down box on the right at the top of the list you can select other posts or All posts. The information you gather this way will tell you whether your posts are indexed on Search Engines and whether other sites and bloggers are pointing to your blog posts.
Underneath the All posts button in the Manage Content menu is the All Comments button. This way you can see all the comments and trackbacks people and other sites leave behind. You can Unpublish certain comments you find inappropriate for your blog using the unpublish button on the right to every comment. You can also view the comment below the original blog post so you can comment back and engage in discussion with your readers. Very useful!
Ways to write posts
The Control Panel also allows you to write posts. Let's not forget!
Using the Write a blog Post button in the Common Tasks menu, you can write blog posts in the web interface. Unfortunately this is not the most friendly way to write posts. Windows Live Writer is a much more appropriate tool for the job. I suggest you check it out.
Concluding
Now that you have a blog go use it!
What are you still doing here? Come on! Enjoy yourself! 