Make your own weblog

Center for English as a Second Language

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Making Weblogs
GETTING STARTED

There are many reasons to have a weblog: maybe your teacher wants you to have one, or maybe you just want one yourself, or maybe your class wants or needs a group one. Your weblog can be private or public. Public implies that you don't mind people linking to you, and therefore, you don't really mind it if people come in, even from outside, and read what you've written.

When you sign up for a weblog on a free server (we use Blogger.com but you can use any), you will need a URL, a title, and a description for your weblog. If you're not careful, you'll sign up so quickly that you forget what you've done. Often the URL and the Title are the same. For example, Blogger.com will give you this URL: http://ceslstudent.blogspot.com. As a title, you'll put "CESL STUDENT". It won't be until later that you realize that you can put anything in the description: you could put, "this is a place to put my assignments for my class" or you could put, "Life has been difficult lately and I need a place to complain about it..." after a while you will see that people put some very interesting things on their descriptions.

Now that you have a weblog, you will notice that any time you use your password to get into Blogger.com, you will have access to posting (adding messages) or editing (changing old ones), or changing the template (adding links or pictures or words along the side). You may find yourself adding links to your friends' weblogs (be sure to respect their privacy if they want), or adding links to CESL (thank you) or interesting sites in CESL, or pictures of yourself. It's all good! Follow the directions below.

PASTING WORD FILES

Your weblog should accept your paper just as you wrote it. There are several things you should check when you copy your paper and paste onto your weblog. First, make sure you have put a title somewhere. You often cannot copy this easily, or the weblog wants it in a separate place. Second, the weblog (blogger) loses the indentations. Therefore you should add a space between paragraphs and between references in order to mark new paragraphs. The weblog does not honor bold or italics but you can mark them with b tags (b, /b with brackets) or i tags (i, /i with brackets). You may want to view your paper before you post it, just to make sure everything came out right. Sometimes double-space and other formatting get lost in the transfer. Overall, if you learned how to use Word, you can learn this; it's not too hard!!

ADDING LINKS

Most weblog servers, like blogger.com, require you to know some "code" or basic HTML, but this is not difficult. For example, a link to CESL looks like this: a href="http://www.siu.edu/~cesl">CESL; except that I was unable to use the starting bracket (<) , because if I had, you would be unable to see the code that I wrote. The starting bracket (<) and the "a href=" tells the computer to make a link with the URL, and then make the "CESL" part appear lit up on the page. Try it! If you are able to make one link, you'll be able to make a million. The question really is where to PUT it. As you scroll down the template code, you'll see h1> and h2> tags (again, I have taken out the starting < brackets); these are headlines. Put your link under the one you want it to appear under. When you go back to change it, remember that template changes don't always take effect until you republish the blog; in other words, you may have to add a message of some kind just in order to see what changes you've made to the template! But don't worry; you can always take them away later!

ADDING PICTURES

Pictures have a home on the web, and you can generally find it if not just copy and paste the picture as you would a word file. There are two considerations: First, the picture belongs to someone just like a paragraph would, so you should ask permission before you pick it up and put it somewhere. Second, it might be too wide, in which case you want to designate the height and width in the right proportions. A picture tag looks like the following: img src="http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/images/big_pulliam.gif" width=67 height=81 alt=pulliam align=right> where you add the opening bracket (<) that will make the computer turn the whole thing into a picture. The alt tag will tell the blind and picture-free what is in the picture. The height and width need to be proportional. "Align" tells the computer where in the given space the picture should be: in this case, on the right edge of the viewer's screen.

Easy, huh? Try it. Join the thousands of people who have taken up basic html, a very simple language, to create and publish their own ideas. It's easy, it's fun, and best of all, it's good for your language development.

Eads Bridge, St. Louis, from the US GenWeb Archives
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Page maintained by
Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
Picture at top from SIUC image gallery.