Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktIt seemed to work well for us for a couple of days when we started on Blogspot, so here’s a post to serve as the place to ask questions, add tidbits for a future faqs page, share your newly acquired wisdom, publish your wish list and sound off on what you do and don’t prefer to see in terms of functionality and appearance. At least until next Monday.
And I’m oh-so-sure that not one of us will post admin/pref comments on any other thread.
okiegirl
Filed under: administrative |
All Things in Moderation 
Here’s what I’ve learned so far in a nut shell:
(1) If you hover over the “All Things in Moderation” icon on the black toolbar at the top of the page you find the Dashboard and all of its wonderful links. It seems to be self-explanatory (or at least intuitive and explorable) from there.
(2) Think of the “update” button on the posting page as saving the post. . . and always click it before trying something else (like previewing).
(3) Classic html code works in the commenting box, but the only way we’ve found to put a space between paragraphs without mucking with other formatting is to place “blockquote”/blockquote’ at the end of the line or paragraph (replacing the quote with the appropriate arrowhead).
What have I forgotten already????
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UPDATE: The paragraph spacing issue is resolved, so no “blockquote” html is necessary to put space between paragraphs. Just hit “enter” twice.
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You guys sure you want to move the calender? I kind of like it. You can see all the posts for a given day by putting the curser over the day. Plus I think it is actually a part of the theme, and so harder to get rid of. Have to go into the actual code.
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Thanks, scott. Two chances in one week to be a hero; that can’t happen too very often.
I see the function of the calendar now. If you click on a date it takes you to what was posted that day without having to scroll through archives. (So what happened on Jan 7th? It’s the only date with no posts.) That does not have enough usefulness for me to warrant priority over our other widgets, just my opinion.
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Just so you know my thinking on the sidebar changes….the right side all has to do with the history of the blog. Search for posts, archives (both by calendar and monthly links), and categories.
Then, on the left side, all other things…list of authors, favorite links (which I still have to figure out how to cahnge), link dump, and anything else we might want.
That’s the thinking behinds what I’ve done.
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OK…I sorted out how to add links to the blog roll. Go to the dashboard, click on links, then “add new”. Fill out the info. Make sure you tick the “blogroll’ box under categories. i will figure out how to add new categories, which should allow us to then have another “link dump” section separate from the blog roll, as we had before.
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BTW…I will take some time later to add the links that we had at the old site. If anyone wants to help, have at it.
Oh, and another upgrade from the blogger system…if you hover over the link, it gives a description (which you can fill out when you add the link). I’ve done it for The Plum Line. Anyone irritated by my description is free to change it. I was just experimenting. 🙂
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When adding a link to the blogroll, tick the “Sites to visit in Moderation” instead of blogroll.
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They will be ordered in alphabetical order.
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OK, now that the Niners have won…
I’ve finally sorted out the Link Dump section as well. So to add a link to the Link Dump, do the same as for the blogroll, ie in the dashboard go to “links” and add a link. But instead of choosing as a category “Sites to visit”, choose “link dump”. And voila.
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Agree no avatars on recent comments, but can it somehow show partial comment content, not just who posted and where?
Scott, what do you mean about the personal comments on the avatars?
btw, clicking on an avatar in the author list does show all that author’s posts all the way back to “welcome from lmsinca” at the beginning of ATiM.
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If you hover over someone’s avatar, some people have a little quote or saying or something that shows. I figured out how to do it. If you edit your profile, whatever you put in the “About me” box shows up.
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Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to show a part of the comment in the Recent Comments section. Just not the way it works, unfortunately.
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Leave for a day and everything changes. You guys like the typeface? I’ll pitch Arial again, but later. Busy, busy bees.
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ALL, when adding a link to sites to visit or link dump, before saving your link please scroll on down to “Target” and select the first option (“blank” or something like that) so the link will open in a new tab or window. I think we need to add this to the faqs page when we get that far.
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I just plunged in with “liberation sans” as what I thought was close to arial.
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Just created and added a log-in widget underneath the authors on the home page.
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That should be useful.
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BTW…I am going to put the link dump widget above the the blogroll widget. The link dump will only show the latest 10 links, while the blogroll in unlimited, so I think it makes sense to have the limited one above the unlimited one, so that it doesn’t keep getting pushed down the page.
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I just put up a new political post for commenting. . . should I start a new admin post, also, as this one has 240+ comments at the moment?
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michi, let’s leave this admin post. I’m working on cleaning out all the comments that now are extraneous. It’s just going to take a few minutes.
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They are. . . and I haven’t figured out yet how to re-order them. I suspect it has something to do with the removal of “extraneous” comments during moderation. Moderator beware!! 🙂
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Lmsinca, I love that everybody’s engaged. I think that’s awesome. When I have some time I’m going to tweak the CSS and do a new logo header. There’s some stuff I’d like to see, and I’ll see what I can do come Tuesday or Wednesday. But I Still need to see it on a computer. 🙂
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All, done with clean-up on this thread so we can resume posting admin news and questions. If you are seeing your own comments noted as “under moderation,” please delete or repost it if you think it needs to stay.
At 1240MST, there are 32 comments remaining (this might not include a count of yours that are “under moderation”) with the last being comment by kevin at 12:10pm.
Sorry that Scott’s 1/15 8:54am comment is now out of order. Don’t know why that happened. All others should be in correct date/time order. Please let me know if it appears differently to you.
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Why did everything get purged? I think it may have been useful for people who weren’t involved either yesterday or today to be able to see what people were thinking about as the style developed, and perhaps answer some of their own questions or avoid suggestions that had already been raised.
There was an awful lot of newly acquired wisdom, as the post above put it, in those comments that is now lost.
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There were over 240 comments and I did not think everybody would want to come back and read through all of that, especially about themes and fonts which seem to be pretty settled now. But many of the comments are still on the admin comments page. You can restore any you think might be valuable by marking them “approved.”
Sorry, did not think you would mind.
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An improvement I’m noticing over blogspot: Our “recent comments” here seems to update instantaneously (thought maybe it won’t when commenting traffic is heavier). On blogspot, there was a significant time lag.
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Haaaaaaaaahaaaaaa, just thought of something funny, scott owns this place now, anyone complains we can blame it on him. 😉
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Of course the opposite is also true……….if everyone likes it we’ll never be able to prove he had any help, lol.
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I am not a fan of the new font (Liberation Sans). I find it hard to read.
But then I’ve been studying a typography book lately and getting brainwashed.
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