Online Journalism

Session 10 - Links

This session we're looking at the different ways journalists can approach writing news and features online. Part of the session will be taken up with looking at online story construction - in particular at 'chunking', the various ways you can 'chunk' stories online and why you might want to do it in the first place.

We'll also cover how you can use the various strengths of the net - immediacy, global reach, multimedia, the archive, linking and interactivity - to make news and features more effective.

As part of that we'll be looking at various well known sites and how they approach news and features. Some - like Salon and BBC News, we've looked at before. If you get a chance, have a look at 'The Good, the Bad and the Fugly' on Salon. Slate is a good place to look at online features writing - if there's time we might look at their story on the 'Fiona Apple Fiasco'.

We're also going to examine the way newspapers and news media sites are using blogs to cover the election, specifically, the election blogs run by The Guardian, The Times and the BBC. If you get the chance to look at them before the session, try to think about the new possibilities blogging offers these big news/media operations.

If there's time, we might look at sites/blogs that are taking a more radical approach to news/features online, or offering a different perspective on the news, or finding new ways to tell stories. The things we might cover include:

Slashdot and Plastic, two sites where informed users link to and comment on stories they find online.

The personal blog maintained by Kevin Sites, a freelance solo journalist currently on assignment for NBC News.

Back to Iraq 3.0 - Kevin Allbriton's blog - he describes himself as the web's first fully reader-funded journalist blogger. He's an independent reporter in Iraq, who uses his blog to publish stories and appeal for donations from readers to fund his work. 

September 12th, a polemical online video game/cartoon created by Newsgaming.com.

Session 6 Notes - Part Three

Using links

Hyperlinking – the ability to link together different documents, stored in different locations – is probably the distinctive thing about writing on the web.

When Tim Berners-Lee began to develop the web at the end of the eighties/beginning of the nineties, links were a crucial part of his vision. He wanted to find ways to access documents relevant to his research, even if they were stored on computers that were located in other offices/locations on the campus of the Swiss research establishment (CERN), where he was working at the time

Berners-Lee brought together two existing ideas – the internet (the network of computer networks) and hypertext, a way of linking documents via keywords or footnotes.

As an idea, hypertext has been around for a while. It was anticipated in "As We May Think" an essay written just after the end of WW2 by the American scientist Vannevar Bush – he imagined a PC-like futuristic tool called a Memex, which reader could use to follow links, or ‘trails’ through different documents and subjects.

In the seventies/eighties, the computer pioneer Ted Nelson began to try to put this idea into practice, developing the idea of hypertext links. At first people thought of these as links to different documents stored on the same computer/in the same location.

Think of the early CD ROM encyclopedias and the linked footnotes that let you move from one entry to another on the same subject. That was the basic model. Berners-Lee brought the computer network to this and the web was born. Now you can read something created in/stored on a computer in the UK, then follow a link to related document in Australia and then on to India etc etc.

Learning how to use links appropriately and imaginatively is a key skill for online journalists.

When you put a story you’ve written online, you can link it to other stories you’ve written and other documents on the site where you’ve published it. You can link to the sources you used to write the story – both people and information resources. You can link to previous coverage of the story by other news/media organisations. You can link out to related issues/trends.

Links open out a piece of journalism. They’re part of the conversational approach we’ve talked about before in online journalism – the idea that on the net journalists should act more as guides who can open out a story and the ideas in it, than authoritative gatekeepers who have the last word on a particular subject.

Links enact this in a literal way – they show people where your story came from and where it’s going. They make it part of a network of people and information, a network than can link back to the story and add to it in various ways.

The writer Steven Johnson has argued (in his book ‘Interface Culture’) that hyperlinks haven’t just transformed the structure of what we write online; they’ve also transformed our sentences. His idea is that online writers should see the link as a new kind of punctuation, something you can use to add meaning to your work in new ways.

Johnson’s thinking here was a response to the way links were used on the irreverent webzine/protoblog Suck – it’s offline now, but its influence lives on. Writers for Suck were encouraged not just to use links in a straightforward/useful ways – i.e. as reference tools/high tech footnotes. Instead they used links to create little sub-textual gags. For example, if a story ever contained the words ‘jaded sellout’, they would often put a link under the words back to Suck.

As Johnson says in his book, the writers on the site used links to condense their prose, to suggest allusions without spelling them out. Their links were often like riddles or clues or sarcastic asides. They weren’t ‘centrifugal’ – they didn’t send you away from the piece. Instead they drew people back to the text to get more out of it. Indeed, you often didn’t need to click the link to get the message. You just needed to hover your cursor over the link and see where it was pointing, to get the gag/allusion.

The kind of linking you used to find on Suck is still pretty radical, as far as the mainstream web is concerned, where many sites still seem unconvinced of the value of linking to other online pages. But it’s worth being aware that there are more imaginative/offbeat ways to use links in your writing online.

Internal and External Links

The latter are fairly self-explanatory – they take you away from a site to somewhere else online. The former are navigational links that help people find their way round a site/article.

Internal links could include links taking you to other parts of a particular story, or to similar stories on the same site or to previous coverage stored in the site archive. Internal links need to be clear and not confusing – this is not the place to indulge in clever clever linking.

There is a still a lot of debate (especially at big news/media sites) about the wisdom of adding external links to your stories. Many still argue that since you’ve spent a lot of money persuading people to come to your site, it’s stupid to then give them an easy way to leave.

Others think that trying to hold on to your readers, to keep them on your site, feels oppressive on the web, which is all about linking and open networks. Neither of these positions dominate online, though bloggers are obviously in the second camp and big online media sites tend to fall into the first.

Big news/media sites do now include links to primary sources for a story, or related sites. They will also occasionally link to stories in their archives – though often you have to pay to access past coverage. Many baulk at linking to coverage of stories by competitors.

When you’re adding external links to a story, you need to think about the sites/stories you’re linking to. Clearly, you shouldn't link to material that is illegal. But what about material that some people may find offensive/controversial?

Many big sites have policies about what they can and can’t link to. It’s something they need to think about quite carefully. It’s not just that readers may be offended by some material. Some sites treat links from well known media brands as a sign of legitimation – they may then use it in their promotional material (‘as linked to by the BBC’ for example).

Overall you need to think carefully about justifying your links editorially. What do they add to the story? What do they do for the site as a whole? What will readers get out of them? If you’re concerned about the sites you’re linking to, it’s wise to raise your concerns around the link and issue a disclaimer.

Presenting Links

There are various different ways to add links to a story. You can put them at the end, like footnotes. Or you can put them in a sidebar, under the heading ‘Related Material’ or ‘Further Reading Online’. Or you can incorporate them in the actual copy.

Big online media sites tend to prefer separating links off from actual story copy – perhaps because they think links add a level of confusing information to the story, perhaps because they want people to get to the end of a story before they click off somewhere else. Bloggers tend to prefer including links in story copy.

Wherever you choose to put your links, you then need to think about how to actually write them. For example, should you include the title of the page/site you’re linking to and the web addresses (all the http stuff)? That can look clunky and inelegant, especially with long addresses.

Online, it’s generally better to use the title of a site and make that the link. When people put their cursor over the link, they’ll be able to read the full address in the status bar at the bottom left of their browser screen, if they want.

In the past you used to see people putting links into copy via the ‘click here’ method. They’d mention a document/site then say you could go there and read it yourself by clicking ‘here’ – here would be a link to the document.

This can look a little clumsy, unless you’re actually playing with the form a little. Many bloggers go the other way and fold links into their general copy, leaving net literate readers to figure out where the links go to and what they might add to the copy.

Your blogs are a good place to experiment with how to add links to your copy. Try different things and see what works best. With the articles you’re writing for your assessment, it might be best to include links in the copy but also add a catch-up list at the end of the piece. Again, it’s something you should play around with to what you like best.

In general, try to think about making your links interesting and relevant. It’s fairly pointless to add links to front page of The Guardian or the BBC or other big news sites. Everyone knows where they are by now. Instead, you should link to specific stories on those sites.

Similarly, when you’re commenting on blog posts, don’t link to the main blog address. By the time people go there, the blogger in question could have written many more posts, so people won’t understand why you linked and they’ll get confused. Instead, link to specific blog posts – use the ‘permalink’ or unique address for a particular post when you’re adding a link.

In general, don’t overfill your writing with links – unless you’re going for a particular effect. The key thing to remember is that hyperlinks are a great way to add meaning to your writing - if you use them well.

Sesion 6 Notes - Part Two

Sorting out the settings on your blog helps to make it presentable (and helps you to take advantage of some of Blogger’s useful tools/functions).

But if you want people to read your blog, you need to think in a more general way about what you want to do with it and how it can help your journalism online and off.

There’s lots of advice online about what you can do with blogs – Warwick Blogs is a project aimed at offering everyone at the university – staff and students – the chance to create a blog if they want. They have some good introductory advice on the different ways people can use weblogs.

Would-be journalists can use blogs in various ways.

As a showcase for your work

Blogs offer 'push-button personal publishing'. You can write what you think and publish it immediately, for the rest of the world to see. So the first use for blogs is as a way to get your writing/ideas/stories out there.

Beyond this, if you're already writing for established sites/publications, a blog can work as a kind of online ‘cuttings file’. You can put the things you write on your blog. If you write something for another site, you can link to it.

The American journalist Clive Thompson does something like this on his blog, Collision Detection. If he writes something for the New York Times or for the online magazine Slate, he'll put links and sometimes the full story on his blog

Even if you're not being published 'officially', a blog can still be a useful showcase. If you want to write a particular kind of journalism (music reviews, football news), start doing it on your blog. If you keep at it, you'll build up a selection of work you can then show to editors of both online and real world publications.

As a place to develop your technique and ideas

Writing regularly on your blog will help develop your basic technique and your personal style. With things like reviewing, editors are looking for an interesting take and a distinctive style. You can use your blog to help develop those.

Think of it as a kind of ‘mind gym’, a place where you can test out styles and ideas, where you can tone and hone your prose style. Blogs allows for a kind of thinking aloud in public – just writing a post can sometimes help you figure out what you think.

Lots of high profile writers use their blogs in this way - for example the American science writer Steven Johnson has written about how writing his blog (and responding to comments) has helped him develop ideas.

As a vehicle for ‘personal reporting’

Lots of blogs are very personal affairs. People write about their relationships, their jobs, their families and more. This may sound mundane, but many blogs that specialise in ‘personal reporting’ are well written, entertaining, illuminating and newsworthy. Good enough to appear in the mainstream press, which has an obvious appetite for ‘confessional writing’ and specialist columns that lift the lid on specific professions/workplaces.

Blogs are a good place to practise that kind of journalism, develop your style and potentially even build an audience. The most popular workplace blogs – Call Centre Confidential, for example, now sadly defunct – are read by lots of people and have received mainstream attention as a result. We’ve talked before about how there’s space for a blog that details the realities of modern student life – from dealing with debt to working to supplement the student loan.

As a media filter

In the mainstream media/press, there’s an awful lot of coverage about other coverage – press digests about what other papers are saying, TV shows about other TV shows. Blogs are built for this kind of journalism – ‘media filtering’. As you read things online, you can link to them and give your take on them. For many people this is what blogs are all about. They’re a way for ordinary individuals to participate in the media and feedback their views, even take over and develop certain stories.

Journalists need to be highly media literate, aware of stories and trends, able to offer their own take or angle. Blogs let you develop and showcase this skill. If you direct people to interesting stories online (and/or offer an interesting interpretation) people will enjoy and return to your blog.

As a research tool

Blogs offer a great way to keep track of things you find online – and the ideas you have about them as you’re browsing. As you find and read things, you can make notes and link to the story on your blog. That way you have a record of what you were thinking about. The American SF writer Cory Doctorow refers to blogs used in this way as 'outboard brains'.

Crawford Kilian (a specialist in writing online) has an interesting research blog tracking news coverage of Avian Flu – he’s done it to keep himself informed. But his blog is turning into a useful general resource.

These kinds of blogs can help people pool their research. For example, say you were trying to track media coverage of student attitudes to the General Election – you could create a blog, then work together to post links to different stories you found in different news/media sites, with your comments. By working together, you’d soon build up a really useful journalistic resource.

As a way to build contacts and develop your social network

Bloggers love to comment on, and link to, other blogs/sites. As you do that, you build up potentially useful contacts, people who may refer other people to your journalism and help raise your profile in general. Some bloggers leave comments on big news/media sites, often with a link back to their own blogs. A few have succeeded in creating a lot of traffic as a result – some have even got work as mainstream media pundits as a result.

So there’s a careerist benefit that can come from using your blog as a social networking tool. Beyond that, this kind of social networking can enable a new kind of collective journalism, in which a group of people work together to develop a story, find out more abut something already covered in the media, or perhaps even expose/correct mistakes.

An old example of this is the way bloggers/contributors to MetaFilter worked together to expose what’s become known as the Kaycee Nicole Cancer Hoax – you can still read some of the original Metafilter threads in which people discuss the story.

Exercise 8

Create a Site Map for your site/article – include a Page Inventory

The aim here is to build on the things we discussed in Session 9 relating to basic web design and how you should apply it to your site/article.

Sketch out a basic structure for your site – i.e. something that shows the connections and links between different sections. Then do the same for your article.

The put together a Page Inventory for the site as a whole and the article in particular. A Page Inventory is a list of the elements that should always be included on each page.

Once you’ve done that, you can specify the elements that will only appear on individual pages.

If you do this in the next week, you can bring it along to the Copy Clinic on April 28^th and we can talk about it.

Exercise 7

Working with your Blogger settings/templates

This exercise related to things we covered in various sessions – specifically, Session 6 and Session 9.

1. Tidy up your blog and make sure the various settings are in order.

That means working via Blogger Dashboard to make sure your blog is set to the right time zone, that posts display a correct timestamp. It also means putting together an appropriate profile and making sure your archives and comments are set up appropriately.

2. If your blog doesn’t already have a Links bar, add one and then add at least ten links to it.

You’ll find specific advice on this on my blog. You need to cut and past some code into the sidebar section in your Blogger template. Then you should add at least ten sites to that Links section. These can be favourite sites, sites that you use everyday to track news, sites that refer to the subject of your blog – it’s up to you.

Advice On Your Portfolios

Here's some things to think about as you put together your portfolios/articles.

Overall, I'm looking for evidence that you know how to use the net to research stories, gather information and contact/interview sources.

I'm also looking for articles that set out to take full advantage of the net. So you need to link to the sources you used, to other sites that could relate to your story. You also need to give readers space for feedback, and give them somewhere else to go online to find out more, if they're interested in what you've done.

Your articles should be written/designed with the net's potential and limitations in mind.

Think about how to lay out the story/split it up, to make it easier to read/find.

Think about how you write. Again, you need to work with the limitations of the screen/net - so think about scannable text, about using headlines/type/layout correctly.

When it comes to your weblog, I'm looking for signs that you've thought about how to use it in your journalistic career. Is it a personal platform for a type of journalism you want to do in future (e.g. music/film reviews), is it a vehicle for personal reporting about your life, is it a media filter, where you link to and reflect on current stories/trends?

When it comes to design/style, I'd like to see evidence that you've worked with the Blogger template, added a Links bar, sorted out the time stamps, archives and the rest.

In terms of style, blogs allow for a more personal/conversational style than other sites. You can write in a looser way, but that doesn't mean spelling mistakes and punctuation/grammatical errors are OK. Here, again, I'm looking for a sense that you're using the blog's potential - to link to people/blogs/specific discussions online.

Hope that helps. Again, if you have any problems, talk to me in class or leave comments here.

Assessment Requirements

The module handbook details what should be in your portfolio.

If you can't find that/never had one, the portfolio should include:

• A selection of exercises - at least four. If you've done some of them on the blog, then print out the relevant post.
• An original website, consisting of three pages/sections - an introductory homepage, an article page (which can then be divided into various sections, as you choose) and a weblog...

The article page/section should feature an original piece of journalism, (1000 words) with evidence of internet research, footnotes, hyperlink and suggested further reading. You should also propose search engines for which your site could be targeted.

Jane Taylor sent me an email about how you should deliver all this - here's what she said:

Students should provide a printed copy, as well as a CD, of their work. On the deadline day, Thurs 5 May, they need to take the work to the Faculty office, and post in in the named post box just outside the office, making sure they attach the appropriate cover sheet, which is available from the office.  They can only give in work on the assessment day, and this should be between 9.30 and 4.30. On the following day, the office registers receipt of the work.

So you need to burn off a copy of your site, once you've done it, then print it out on paper.

Now, given that we've done our blogs on Blogger, copying the whole site on to a CD will be little difficult. So what you should do is make sure there is a working link to your blog on the introductory homepage of your site. I'm also not expecting you to print out all of your blog for inclusion. Just print out four posts (but not exercise posts) and put them in the portfolio.

If you're confused/uncertain about any of this, talk to me in class of leave comments here and I'll get back to you.

Session 6 Notes - Part One

The first part of this session was taken up with tidying up/sorting out your blog. Things we covered included sorting out the time stamps, the comments and the archive options.

To do this now/catch up on things you should have done then, log in to Blogger, then go the Blogger Dashboard and click on Change Settings. This takes you to the Basic page of the Settings section. Here you can specify some basic features on your blog.

If you choose to add your blog to the Blogger listings, it means other users on the service will have another way to find your site. You can also choose to add Email Post Links to your blog posts – this makes it easy for someone who reads your blog to mail a post they like/disagree with/find funny to a friend. Potentially it adds to the social networking side of your blog. Whether you add it is up to you, of course.

One thing you should make sure add to your blog is the Compose mode – see the bottom of the page. This is a basic What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor – that means that you can write the posts and add things like hyperlinks via simple buttons, without getting into writing the actual HTML.

Whatever changes you choose to make, click Save Settings, then scroll to the top of the page and click Publishing. You’ve already chosen to publish on Blogspot, so there’s not that much to do on this page. You can choose to notify weblogs.com when you publish a new post. Weblogs.com is one of a number of sites that tracks blogs – it’s potentially another way to let people know about your blog and raise traffic. Again, whether you choose to use it is up to you.

Again, if you make changes, click Save Settings, then at the top of the page, click Formatting.

Time Stamps

This section lets you change the basic format of your blog posts. You can choose the number of days’ posts that are shown on the main page. The default is set at Seven Days. If you post a lot every day, you could change this to minimise the number of posts people see on the front page. Again it’s up to you.

However, you should definitely make sure you get the date headers/time settings right on your blog. Time stamping is one of the distinctive features of blogging. It emphasises the way blogs are a ‘live’ form, something that lets people publish their ideas round the clock, as they have them.

Time stamps are useful if you post several times a day. They also can give a real sense of connection to the person behind the blog. If you discover they were writing a particular post in the middle of the night, it’s another piece of information that lets you assess that post and the ideas in it.

There are various other things you can do on this page to make posting easier – for example, creating a template for your blog posts – whether you do is up to you. But you do need to sort of the timestamps. Once you’re done, click Save Settings then scroll back to the top of the page and click Comments.

Comments/Archiving

As you might expect, the first of these lets you adjust the settings round your Comments. If you permit Anyone to comment, it means that people can leave anonymous comments. This can be abused (as some of you have already discovered). Some people like to leave anonymous wind-ups/abuse on blogs. It’s trivial on one level, but it can lead to larger problems. So you might want to limit comments to Blogger users.

Aside from that you can make sure your comments are time stamped – again this is provides a useful source of information about people leaving comments. If you get a flurry of anonymous comments, all around the same time, you can usually assume they’re from the same person (or two people) sat together around the computer.

Comment Notification can be useful – if you give an email address, Blogger will mail you when someone leaves a comment on your blog. It can be useful if you’re trying to keep up a discussion on your blog.

Whatever settings you change, click Save Settings, scroll back up the page and click on Archiving. Here you can alter your Archive Frequency. That is, you can choose to display daily, weekly or monthly archives. The key thing to think about here is how often you post. If you’re posting one or two things a day, go for Weekly, If you’re posting less, go for Monthly.

Make sure that you have enabled Post Pages – this means that each of your blog posts has its own unique web page (other blogging services refer to these as permalinks). It means that people writing about your blog can link directly to the post they’re interested in, rather than the blog as a whole.

Email/Members/Site Feed

Once you’ve done all that, you should explore the remaining sections. Email lets you set set up a ‘mail to blogger address’ – you can email a post to that and it will be published on your blog. Members lets you control who can see (and post to) your blog. It can be useful if you’re using your blog to co-ordinate a work project.

Site Feed is worth exploring. Blogger will let you syndicate your blog via Atom – this means that people with newsreaders can subscribe to your blog – their newsreader program will then automatically get new posts from your blog for them, without them having to ‘visit’ your site. Site Feed lets you choose to do this and specify the amount of each post you make available as a feed.

You can make the full post available or just the first paragraph – this is another reason why you should think carefully about using headlines/post titles effectively. Many people now use newsreaders to scan lots of content – sometimes all they will see of a blog post is a title and the first sentence.

You can find out more about site feeds from Blogger Help.

Session 4 Notes - One last thing

A quick last note relating to Session 4 – we’re using Blogger for the module blogs because, in its basic form, it’s free.

It’s also one of the best known blogging services – and in terms of tone/style, it sits somewhere between services aimed more at media professionals and services intended as purely personal/social networking tools.

There are lots of examples of the latter – Live Journal lets you set up a basic blog for free. It’s mainly used as a social thing – LJ users don’t tend to see themselves as potential media pundits. They’re more interesting in sharing ideas/feelings with friends.

In contrast, Typepad is aimed much more at media/knowledge professionals. This service is run by Six Apart, (they also own Live Journal). You have to pay to blog on Typead, but you do get extra features and design options you don’t get with the free services.

Lots of community sites now offer blogging as part of their service package – for example My Space – Simon’s running a blog there at the moment. Again, these kinds of blogs are less about publishing and more about social networking.

As I said before, Blogger seems like a good compromise between social and professional. It’s open-ended enough to let you decide which direction you want to take your own blog.

Over time, if your blog becomes important to you – either personally or professionally, you may want to think about spending a little money every month to get something that gives you a little more control.

Session 4 Notes - Part Two

Most of Session 4 was taken up with setting up a blog on Blogger. There’s lot of information about this in Blogger’s Help section. But if you’re doing it all over again, or if you missed the session, here’s a basic walkthrough…

Before you get started, make sure you’re using Firefox to browse the web – Internet Explorer 5 for Macs is a pretty poor browser and it doesn’t seem to display a lot of the Blogger functions you’re going to need when working on your blog. Firefox is now installed on all the machines in the newsroom.

So log on to Blogger and click on the Create Your Blog Now button. This takes you to a screen where you set up a Blogger account. You need to enter some basic details – your name, email address, password and also the name that will be used to sign your blog posts. You can choose to use your real name, or an alias/nickname, or your first name. It’s up to you.

Then click on Continue. You’ll go to a screen where you choose a name for your blog and a place to host it. The easy thing to do is to put your blog on Blogger’s hosting service, Blogspot. However, if you have space elsewhere online – say at your ISP’s site, you can choose to host it there.

When it comes to choosing a name for your blog – and a name that will be used to sign your posts, think about what you want to use the blog for. If it’s a professional tool, a way for you to build your journalistic profile and showcase your work online, you’ll want to use your real name, both for the posts you write and for the address – which could be something like jim_mcclellan.blogspot.com…

But if you want to do something more personal, you could use a nickname for your posts and for the blog name… You can also choose to keep your blog anonymous. There are lots of anonymous blogs online – many are about people’s experiences at work. People use anonymity so they can tell the truth about their job/workplace. In most cases, if they revealed their real names, they’d get sacked…

Once you’ve chosen a name/location, you move to choosing a template. You’ll go to a screen offering various options. Again, think about what you want to do with your blog – is it about work, or is it a social/personal thing, or a mix of both.

Most of the Blogger templates follow the same basic pattern and feature the same basic elements – links to your profile, past posts and your archive. Some templates also feature a Links bar, where you can put links to your favourite sites.

Don’t get too hung up now on finding exactly the right template. You can change it later, once your blog is set up – and if you do it then, you’ll find you have a bigger selection of preset templates to choose from.

Once you’re comfortable with your blog, you can edit your template to add features and change certain elements. You can also use design templates created by other companies.

Once you choose a template, you can create your basic blog. Once that’s done, you’ll go the Blogger Dashboard page. You then need to create your first post. Click on the New Post button. This takes you to the Posting page.

Before you get started, click on the Compose tab at the top right of the text window. Across the top of the window you should now see a series of buttons and menus you can use to change the font and point size of your post, to bold, bullet point and justify your copy.

Look for the Link button – the one showing a link in a chain. You can use this to add hyperlinks to your post. Highlight the words you want to add the link to, click on the Link button. This will call up a dialog box – you then add the address of the site you want to link to. You need to make sure that the ‘http://’ part of the address is included – otherwise the link won’t work.

Once you’ve done your post, you can click on the Preview link – top right of the text window – to see what it will look like on your blog. This is a good way to spot typos/spelling mistakes. If you see something you need to fix, come back to the text window. Once you’re happy, click Publish Post…

Blogger will flash up a holding screen telling you that it’s publishing your post/re-publishing your blog. Once it’s done you can log on again to your blog, to see how it looks. If it doesn’t seem to show your new post, hit the Refresh button.

That’s the basics – in other sessions we spent some more time on tidying up your blog and sorting out the key settings…

In the meantime, if you want some general advice on blogging, try Rebecca Blood’s Ten Tips for a Better Weblog. She also has some good advice on choosing the right blogging tool.