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

Your site needs to not require a login in order for the it to be syndicated on the main class site https://sites.evergreen.edu/musicalcities

• From the Dashboard, go to Settings > Reading to change your site's visibility settings
• Change this to 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 (First name last initial is always a safe bet).

• To change your display name click on your display name in the upper right next to the "Howdy"
• Choose, Edit profile
• Use the Display name publicly drop down box to set this. 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

Content to include in your sites

Example site: http://blogs.evergreen.edu/glasgow/

Required sections of your spring field study.

Pages

• "Prospectus": research questions, research methods (this is what other workshop is doing)
• "Readings": a list of spring quarter readings
• "Map": global map that uses the GeoMashup plugin to display your geo-located posts

Posts

• A post called “before I leave”
• Journal entries that use the location as an organizing principle for each entry including:
  • weekly research progress
  • reflections on your spring readings
  • city photography, city sketches
  • city sounds
  • geo-mapping using the GeoMashup Google Maps plugin
  • stories about your time in your city: surprises, museum visits, concerts and other encounters with city music,
  • 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.

Enable Maps to geolocate your posts

• 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
• Once activated, make sure to change your GeoMashup Settings to point to you "Map" page as the global map page - see Create a Global Map page

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.