South Dakota

Here are the instructions for adding a hit counter to your blog. This is a useful tool to see how many people are visiting your community blog.

Here are the updated instructions for adding a Picasa slide show to your blog. This is a great way to share pictures of community events with your blog readers.

To all of our community bloggers, one way we have been trying to capture the changes and progess made in your community is by asking you and others in your community to answer questions in the 12 categories defined by NWAF. Just today I sent our main community contacts the final two questions.

If you are an Administrator, you can check to see how many posts you have per category in the Dashboard. Just go to Manage>Posts> and click the drop down menu under the “Category” heading as seen in the example below. This will help you to see if you have any categories that may need a little “beefing up”. Questions, let Cheryl know by leaving a comment here or send me an e-mail.

Mike from North Dakota has created a work around for dealing with the photo glitch some of you may be experiencing with Word Press. Click here for some instructions that may be helpful to you.

Ok, bloggers don’t go crazy here–remember sometimes less is more! But for those of you who like to add a little color to your blogs, there is now a shortcut button in your visual editor toolbar. Just click Show/Hide Advanced Toolbar, and you will see several new things to explore, including adding text color with just a mouse click. Have fun and use your color powers wisely!

Recent upgrades to WordPress have added an extra layer of security to the comments sections of the blog posts. This will help to keep spammers out. See below:

Finding it hard to keep up with all the South Dakota Horizons bloggers?

Read more about Using Blog Readers to make your blogging experience easier and less time consuming. I use Google, it’s free and it is user friendly. But there are a lot of services out there just search for “feed readers” or “RSS readers” to find one that you like the best.

Newell came up with a way to track the number of visits to their blogs. Check out the information from “Super Blogger” Heather in Newell at the following link: Handy New Options.

Northwest Area Foundation is working on a plan to track the blog usage, but Newell is just a step ahead of them. Use the solution from Newell if you want to, and I may have more information from NWAF in the future about more sophisticated methods of tracking total blog usage in your communities.

Did you know that the order of the blog posts can be controlled by the date? When editing a blog entry, change the POST TIMESTAMP on the right sidebar, making sure to tick the `Edit timestamp’ checkbox. Use this option when you want to make sure a post “stays on top” rather than getting lost in a sea of posts. A better option might be to create a Page rather than a post for things you want to remain in easy view of your readers.

A post can be dated into the future the same way. For instance if you are going on vacation and won’t be around to blog, but you want a time sensitive message to go live on a certain day you can set the Time Stamp to a future date and time. Make sure the `system date’ is correct for the time zone the blog is in, ie, number of hours from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) formerly GMT. Here in the Central Time zone, we’re currently at -6 UTC. For those of you in the Mountain Time zone it would be -7 UTC. (I think the blogs have a -5 default). Each blog can be changed via the Dashboard>Options>General page.

For an administrator in a community, if you want to receive an e-mail telling you that a comment is awaiting moderation, you need to add your e-mail address. This will alert you each time a new comment is posted. You will recieve an e-mail from which you can choose to approve it, delete it or mark it as spam by following a link in the e-mail. Some people don’t want all these e-mails to come to their inbox, others want to know right away when a comment has been made. Right now, those e-mails go to a NWAF e-mail address, if you want to change that, here’s what you do:

• Go to the Dashboard>Options>E-mail Address
• Change it to your e-mail address

As far as I can tell, only one person’s e-mail address can be used to receive the notices, but any administrator can manage the comments within the Dashboard.

 Happy Blogging!

Our Horizons communities are in the beginning stages of getting their blogs up and running which is great, but how do you keep them going and keep people reading? Here are 5 tips for successful community blogging:

1. Determine the Focus of your Blog - Why should people visit the blog? Is it all about sharing information and advertising community events or do you want to encourage dialogue between community members? Posts should reflect what action you want people to take when they read the blog. Do you want them to think, respond, take action?
2. Stay on Topic - While it’s nice to add tidbits about your favorite holiday recipe, what does that have to do with your community? Make sure posts have a connection back to community, Horizons or taking action on poverty, leadership and community. Be specific, if blog posts get too random and off the wall, you will lose your readers.                  (more…)

Want some help promoting your blog? Try watching the screencasts on how to promote your blog at:  http://communityblogs.us/screencasts/promote-your-blog/. Some of the ideas that Griff Wigley shares with us include:

• E-mail announcements
• Follow up with Study Circles and LeadershipPlenty participants
• Business card sized handouts
• Links to and from other community sites

More ideas with potential:

• Newspaper articles (here’s an example from Newell’s The Valley Irrigator)
•  Some of our communities are doing “Blog Nights” at local school computer labs.
• Offer freebies! How about a free “community mousepad” for bloggers who come to a blog night.
• Prize giveaways! Everyone who signs up as a user and makes a post gets their name entered in a drawing for a fabulous community-based prize.

There’s no one-size-fits-all plan for promoting your community blogs, be creative and don’t forget you have Horizons funds that can help to support these efforts (advertising, printing, food, supplies, promotional items, etc.)

Has your community come up with a great idea? Let us know about it by adding a comment to this message!

You added a new user and you noticed that the WYSIWYG editor looks different from yours, with words like: b, i, link, b-quote and close tags, etc. instead of the user friendly pictures. Here’s how to fix that little glitch: Have the user go the Dashboard, click Profile, then under Your Profile,  make sure there is a checkmark by “Use the visual editor when writing” if there isn’t one, click it to put a checkmark in the box, then click Update Profile. That should fix things for you!

Can’t remember your password? Never fear we can fix it in a jiffy! Just go to your community page, click the Login link at the bottom of the side bar on the right. It will take you to the little blue login screen, at the bottom click “Lost Your Password?” and you just need to input your username and your e-mail address and ta-da! You will be sent  a new password.

OK, so now you have a new password but it’s impossible to remember “5q7wn91″ so you need to simplify it. Once you are logged in, go to your Dashboard, click “Update Your Profile or Change Your Password” it will take you so a screen where you can edit all sorts of information like; how your name is displayed in posts, contact information and of course a way to change your password to one that you can remember.

Leave it up to my technologically savvy folks up north at the Webster blog training to be unsatisfied with just blah black and white text! Well, this is more for advanced bloggers, but if you really, really think you need color here’s how you do it…

In the Write post window you will see a tab for Visual or Code–you usually use the Visual tab–also known as the WYSISYG (say ‘whiz-ee-wig’) editor or “What You See is What You Get”. Since this version of Word Press doesn’t have color as a choice in the WYSIWYG editor, we have to do things the old fashioned way. Anyone who has worked with HTML in creating web pages may find this quite familiar. Here’s a little tutorial for you to watch…

Font Color Tutorial

Here’s a basic color code chart so you can be creative, just replace the number in the code: <font color= “#insert number here”>. Let me know if you have questions.

One of the questions asked at our blog training included, “What role should we give new users that we add from our communities?” Here’s a summary of what each of the 5 roles are:

Choosing the right access level is really up to you, but I would suggest that your main community bloggers have the Administrative role, and the rest of your community members can probably get by with either Editor or Author roles. Remember that as an Administrator, you can change these roles at any time. Happy blogging!

What in the world is a feed, you ask? Take a look at the Screencasts on http://communityblogs.us/ called RSS in Plain English this explains the basics.

If you want to quickly see if your favorite sites (in this case the 21 Horizons communities) added anything new, instead of having to check each and every site, you can just take a look at their “Feeds”. I’ve created some very simple instructions here for you to learn the basics.

Want to get some feedback from your blog readers? Add an opinion poll! There are several websites where you can create them in just a matter of minutes, get the code and paste it in a web post, and ta-da! You can find out what your readers are thinking. I created this one at www.vizu.com, it’s free and user friendly. Here’s an example of one that Newell might use…

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Administrators can change the number of posts that can be seen on the front page of your blog. The default is set at 10 posts, but you can increase it if you want more information to stay on the front page where people can see it before it goes to the archives. If you want to increase the number of posts, go to the Dashboard, choose Options > Reading > Blog Pages and change the “Show at Most” option to a higher number, I’ve chosen to change ours to 20 posts as seen in the graphic to the left. Then click Update Options.

If you are looking for an easy-to-use online photo editor, try www.picnik.com. You can upload your photo, make the changes and save it to your computer. For those of you who want to make a new customized header for your blog, Picnik makes it easy to crop and re-size the photo to the required 750 x 150 size.

Don’t forget to “Moderate Comments” on your blog. On the Dashboard, go to Comments, where you can view the comments “Awaiting Moderation” choose Approve

Now your readers can see the comments others have posted in response to something they read on the  Community Blogs.

When you are reading messages or comments and you want to go back to the main blog page, just click the community name in the header…it’s a hyperlink back to the main page.

I will share an occassional helpful hint or tip here on the South Dakota page for our community bloggers. Here’s the first…

 Think about a blog post the way a reporter writes a newspaper article:

1. It should have a great headline (title) to get the readers attention.
2. The most important information should be at the top of the post. (Who, What, Where, When Why, How)
3. Try to keep it short, readers are less likely to read through miles of text.
4. If you have a particularly long post, use the “Split Post” function so it takes less space on the front page of the blog, but interested readers can click if they want to read more.
5. Use pictures and videos to help tell your story.

You may have photos that you want to share on your blog. This slide show was created using Picasa, a free program available for download from Google. You can get the “codes” from Picasa to add it to your Community Blog. For more information contact Cheryl for instructions…in the mean time, take a look at your Community Coordinators and other Horizons staff having a little fun in Philadelphia in April 2007.