Of Blood and Beauty - WordPress with Geolocation

Getting Started

• Getting Started with WordPress - What is WordPress and how is it being used at Evergreen?

Create a New WordPress Site

blogs.evergreen.edu is Evergreen's WordPress server. You can create your own site, all you need is an Evergreen email address and login.

• Create your first site if you are new to blogs.evergreen.edu.
• Learn how to create additional sites if you already have a site at blogs.evergreen.edu.

Driving in WordPress

• Dashboard Overview

Settings

From your dashboard, update the following settings in your site:

• Settings > General - here you can change your Site Title and tagline, along with the appropriate time zone
• Set time zone to "Los Angeles" - you will need to update your time zone when abroad.
• Settings > Permalinks - set this to Post Name

Change your site visibility

In order for your posts to feed/syndicate to the main class site, Of Blood and Beauty, your own site needs to be publicly viewable.

• At the Dashboard, go to Settings > Reading to change your site's visibility settings
• For this setting, choose either Allow search engines or Disallow search engines

Change your display name

You can control how your name appears next to your writings. Remember, these sites will be public so use a name you feel comfortable with being in the public sphere, such as first name and last initial.

• To change your display name, click on Howdy, [your display name] in the upper right corner.
• Click on Edit My Profile
• Enter desired display name in the Nickname (required) field.
• Select and set desired display name using the Display name publicly as drop-down box. Note: this will change all references in your site, even for posts that were already published.

Writing and Managing your content

• Get Published - Pages and Posts
• Categories and Tags

Sections required for your site:

Pages

• "Map": global map that uses the GeoMashup plugin to display your geo-located posts
• Additional pages, such as Welcome or About, to be determined by faculty and students.

Posts

(To be determined by faculty and students - may include:)

• Journal entries that use the location as an organizing principle for each entry including:
  • geo-mapping using the GeoMashup Google Maps plugin
  • critical and casual reflections about your travels: surprises, museum visits, concerts, encounters, etc
  • other information relevant to your spring work

Images, video and linked files

• Insert an image
• Video - embed video from Vimeo or YouTube
• Link to a file
• Image Galleries
• Audio

Sidebars

Many themes support sidebar content. Often times if you don't anything to your side bar a default set of "widgets" will appear. You can change this by adding your own widgets.

• Widgets - add additional features to your sidebar
• Add external links to your sidebar

Front Page and Navigation

• Change what your front page displays if you'd prefer a static pages instead of your latest posts (optional).
• Custom Menus - allow you to modify the navigation for your site
  • not all themes support custom menus

Designing Your Site

Working with themes

Themes allow you to change the design of your blog at anytime. Changing your theme will not affect the primary content of your site.

• Choose a theme
• Customize your header image - some themes allow for you to add your own header image Appearance > Header Image (may only appear if your chosen theme supports custom header images)
• Make additional changes to your theme (advanced)

Adding functionality to your site with plugins

• Plugin Overview - use plugins to connect your site with a variety of web content including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Want to connect to a popular service that you don't see listed in the available plugins? Let Academic Computing know and we can look into adding it.
  • Tip: Plugins can make your site run slower. Only activate those plugins you are planning on using and deactivate any plugins you're not using.
• Useful plugins for travelers include:
  • GeoMashup
  • Simply Instagram

Enable Maps to geolocate your posts

• In Dashboard > plugins, activate the GeoMashup Google Maps plugin - you will need this to geolocate your journal entries and also allows you to easily embed a map of each location on every post
• Create a new page that will display your Global Map

GeoMashup Settings

Once activated, go to Settings > Geomashup to configure the plugin

• In the GeoMashup Settings > Overall
  • select your newly created map page to be used for your Global Map
  • In Collect Location for, Uncheck Pages - we will only be geolocating posts
• In GeoMashup Settings > Global Maps tab:
  • change Map Width to 100%
  • Set your Default Zoom = 11

Geolocate Posts

Once the GeoMashup plugin is activated a Google Map will appear at the bottom of each post you are editing.

• You can drop a placemark to locate your post. Tip: single click the map to insert a placemark.
• For places you will be posting form frequently, consider Saving the Location.

Embed a Map

• Use the shortcode [geo_mashup_map] to embed the global map on the page you setup to be your global map
• Use the same shortcode [geo_mashup_map] to embed single maps on your geolocated posts
• Optional: On your Global maps page use the shortcode [geo_mashup_category_legend] to add a category legend to filter map placemarks by post category

Wrap Up

• What happens to my site when I graduate?

Additional WordPress Resources

• Built-in Help
  • when you're logged into the Dashboard look in the upper right under "Howdy"
  • Help is context aware so will show you help based on where you are in the WordPress Dashboard
  • Built-in help videos (part of built-in help)
• WordPress Tutorials
• Lynda.com Video Tutorials

Need More Help?

• WordPress Tutorial - for a step-by-step tutorial to get you started
• FAQs - common questions about using WordPress at Evergreen
• All WordPress articles

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Still have questions or problems with WordPress, send Academic Computing a message or call the Computer Center at 360-867-6227.