CT Biz Blogs

Following on my review of Writely, here’s a brief tutorial on how to use it to create a post and publish it on your blog. This is written for new or still somewhat inexperienced bloggers who are interested in trying new tools to help with their blogging productivity. Experienced bloggers don’t need my help.

1. Create a new document.
   On the Start page, choose “New,” in the upper left-hand corner of the window.



2. Enter your text in the new document field.
3. Add links.
   Not all blogs have links in every post, so if you don’t have any, that’s fine. However, Google does look at links when determining page rank, so if that’s important to you, link often, but appropriately. See my post on “How does linking to other blogs help me?”

   To add a link:
   a: highlight the text you wish displayed as the link, then click on the icon (globe with chain-link) in the Writely menu bar. An “Insert Link” dialog box will pop up. If you haven’t decided what text to display, you can put the cursor where you’d like the link to be, click the icon, and add the text in the “Insert Link” popup box.

   

   b: enter the URL in the field. Tip: When you enter the URL in the URL field, make sure to only have one “http://” at the begining of the URL. Since there is already one in the field, it’s easy to wind up with an extra one if you’re pasting in a URL from a web browser address bar. This will break the link.

   c: if you wish to have other text which appears when the cursor is over the linked text, enter it in the “flyover” text box.

   d: if you wish to have the link open in a new window, select that from the checkbox at the bottom of the popup.

   e: click OK when finished.

4. Add any text formatting.
   With Writely, you have all the regular word processor formatting, plus some used mostly on web pages, such as the block quote and other web page styles.
5. Check your spelling. As with any word processor, Writely will underline possible errors, suggest corrections, and allow you to add the word to the dictionary, so it won’t be flagged as a error again.
6. Switch to the blog view of your post by clicking the “Blog” tab in the menu bar.
   Here Writely formats your text into one column, much like the main text column of most blogs. That doesn’t mean that it will look exactly like that on your blog — the width of the column depends on how your blog is configured. But seeing it that way does give you a fresh view of the text, which helps in proofing it one last time.
7. Configure the settings for your blog by clicking on the “Blog Site Settings” button.

   

   a: In the Existing Blog Service section, identify whether you use a hosted provider (such as Blogger) or your own server (not necessarily literally your own server — this just signifies that your blog is set up and running on a server that you control — such as with a web hosting provider like DreamHost.) If you have a hosted blog, you will next select the service you use. If you have your own blog, you will need to determine the API your blog application uses. Writely has a list of the settings of most of the popular blogging applications out there, such as Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc. Find your blog application in Writely’s list, and select it from the API: drop-down list. As you can see, the application I use, WordPress, uses the Movable Type API. Then enter the URL (also on the list of settings document).

   b: Next, enter your Existing Blog Stettings — login information and name of the blog.
   You will only need to configure the setting the first time you post.

8. Publish the blog post.
   Click “Post” and Writely will publish the post to your blog. After you publish, you’ll see the post in the Blog view, with the text “blogged” in orange letters, all over the background of the post.
9. Close the post.
   Click “done” to return to the start page. You will see “blogged” in orange letters next to that entry, in the list.

Caution:
If you choose to use Writely to post to your blog, you should also use it to manage your post. That is, if you wish to modify or delete your post, do it from the Writely interface also. That way you will always remain in sync with your published blog.

To modify or delete your post, return to the Blog view of the post, and choose “Update Post,” or “Remove Post.”

This is the first of my posts for the 20 Blogging types marathon . Stay tuned tomorrow for the next installment.