Blog tips #2: Navigating (Click this title)

Not wanting to insult anyone’s intelligence, this post aims to fully explain how to navigate throughout the blog in simplest of terms. While some are seasoned veterans of surfing the web, others are just boarding this train, so here goes.

Across the top of the blog, you will see the Categories that our posts (articles) get place in. For instance, if you click on “blog tips,” it will bring up all posts that relate to this series of posts. “Featured” will bring up the 1 or 2 posts that have been tagged as “featured”, which usually just means they’re the newest two posts, or at least the two most important posts at that time. All other posts get labeled with “General”.

In order to see the full article for any post, simply click on the title of that article, or, if available, click “Read full post”.

On the right side of the homepage, you will see a box that has these labels: “Popular, Featured, Comments, Tags”. Clicking on either of those labels will change the items in the list below. For instance, clicking on “Comments” shows the most recent comments people have made, who made them, and on which post they made them. “Tags” reveal what’s called a “tag cloud,” meaning that as we post articles to the blog, we “tag” them with the displayed keywords. The more times a certain keyword gets used, the bigger that keyword will appear in the tag cloud. Want to see all articles written by Charlie Halley? Click “charlie” in the tag cloud and his posts will all appear.

Lastly, just after each post is a place to “Comment”. Clicking on this will take you to the comment section of that particular post. Here, you can leave your own comments, or feel free to scroll down to see what others have said. For more detailed info on commenting, visit “Blog tips #1: Commenting“.

Blog tips #1: Commenting

Okay, so perhaps maybe you’re new to blogging, or at least reading one; or perhaps, you’re a seasoned pro. Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, I want to offer a few tips to maximizing your experience on this blog.

When you come to the homepage here, you’ll see the last several blog posts over the last couple of weeks. If you click on the title of the blog, or on the “Read Full Post…”, you will be taken to the full article post.

Directly under the title, you will see the timestamp of when the article was posted, and to the right of that, the number of comments. If you click on “Comments” at this point, you will be taken directly to the end of the article to the comments section where you can leave a comment.

This is a critical feature of the blog. We want you to not just read the articles, but engage them. Think about them. Ponder them. Be challenged by them. Grow. Learn. You get the picture. But we don’t want the journey to end right there. We want you to tell others how you felt, or how it challenged you, etc. This is a collective journey that we’re on, and your thoughts and comments can spur others on.

Now, if you choose to read the whole article first, at the bottom of the article are the comments others may have left. If there are none posted, then please feel free to be the first. Click inside the “Post a new comment” box to leave your comment. The default option is here is that you are “Posting as a Guest”. If so, you will also need to leave your Name, Email and, if you want, a website link (eg, facebook, linkedin, etc). You can also sign up for an IntenseDebate account by clicking “Sign Up”, or, if you have an OpenID, you can log in with that.

Now, here is a really cool feature of our commenting system. If you see someone’s comment and it really provokes a response in you, simply hit the “Reply” button directly beneath that person’s comment, and you can leave a comment in response to what they had to say! See below for an example.

Other than that, these are the basics of commenting on blogs. The only real catch: you have to actually leave a comment. We don’t want to have any boring blog posts, so by all means, engage it and read the comments from other viewers as well.