Creating a blog entry

You can contribute to any blog for which you have owner, author, or draft permission. The autosave feature resumes your work on entries in progress.

About this task

The permission that you are granted by the blog owner controls whether you can post an entry directly to the blog or whether you can create a draft entry that must be approved by the owner before it is posted. The permissions are as follows:
  • Owner permission allows user to post entries, manage the blog and its users
  • Author permission allows user to post entries, but not to manage the blog
  • Draft permission allows user to save draft entries only
Note: As you create or edit an entry, your work is automatically saved every 15 minutes, unless the site administrator changes the interval. If you leave an entry in an unsaved state when you log out of Blogs, the next time you log in, a notification reminds you that you have an unsaved entry. From that notification message you can click Edit to open the entry and resume work on it, or Discard to delete the entry.

Procedure

  1. Open the blog that you want to contribute to, and click New Entry or click the New Entry icon on the Public Blogs page.
  2. Enter a title for your entry.
  3. Enter the text for your entry.
  4. Enter tags for your entry.
    Tags are keywords that you can assign to describe the content in your entry. Tags make searching for content easier for blog readers. Tags must be entered as single words, or multiple words that are connected with hyphens or underscores. For example, social-bookmarking, status_reports, and payroll would all be valid tags.
  5. Click Advanced Settings to control these settings:
    • Allow characters to be converted into emoticons.
    • Delay posting an entry to a blog until a time and date that you specify.
    • Limit the number of days for posting comments for the entry.
    • Specify a custom URL– that is, you can enter some text that replaces the entry title in the URL that points to this entry.
  6. To include an external media link, such as a video, in a feed that includes this entry, enter the URL in the External media URL field.
    For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw2j0YOqKoo.
    When this entry is posted and viewed from a feed reader, the media is available in the entry.
  7. Click Post to publish your entry to the blog or Preview to review your entry before you post.
    If you have Draft permission, your options are Submit for Review and Save as Draft instead of Post. If the blog is moderated, which means that content must be reviewed and approved before it is published in the blog, your post is not visible in the blog until a moderator approves it.