The lecturers and assistants in the workshop have been given the secret password enabling them to add pages to the blog, or to edit pages on the blog, or to post files and make links to them.
Editing an existing web page on the blog
- Make sure you have logged in to the blog’s WordPress site (for example, using the Login page of the blog). In the upper-right corner of the page, you should see “Howdy, fhleqg”
- Find the blog page by (a) using the Schedule and clicking on the lecture or exercise link for that page, or (b) going to the Dashboard and looking at Pages and choosing All Pages, then going through the list till you find the one you want.
- Click on the Edit link, which is either visible on the page, or becomes visible on moving your cursor over the page name in a list of pages, or which may appear in the stripe at the top of the Dashboard.
- Once the page opens for editing, you may want to choose the Visual tab (upper right area). Then you can type in text, and then mark it and boldface or italicize it with the usual B and I buttons, right/left/center justify using the usual buttons for that, or choose a new font or change the font size for the marked text.
- … or you can choose Text mode — then you’re typing raw HTML, so you’d better know what you are doing.
- Save your changes using the Update button in the right column of the browser page — you may need to scroll some to see it. Unless you Update all recent changes will get lost when you are done.
Adding a new lecture or exercise web page
This can be done using the +New tab in the top area of the Dashboard, or the Add New menu item in the left column of the Dashboard. Some things to do:
- In the box at the top, type in the name of the web page. It must start with the year, followed by a blank space. Thus if it is a page for Exercise 3.4, it will look like this: “2018 Exercise 3.4”. This is important — the year must be there to allow us to retain pages from previous years, and not overwrite them.
- You want to have a link to the next page in sequence (the next one in the Schedule). This is a small link in the upper-right part of the page. You can make this by figuring out the name of the next page, and then going into Text mode and inserting as the first line in the page a line like the following:
<p style=”text-align: right”><a href=”http://blogs.uw.edu/fhleqg/2018-lecture-2-1/”>Lecture 2.1</a> →</p>
(you could just copy this one, paste it in, and then change it to the correct year, to be “lecture” or “exercise”, whichever the next page is, and to have the right numbers). - It is best to be in Visual mode when typing in most page content. When you finish doing that, it is essential to push the Publish button in the right-hand column of your browser page. You may need to scroll there to find it. If you do further editing while still editing the page, be sure to push the Update button (which will have replaced the Publish button once the page is published). Forgetting these will cause your carefully crafted content to be lost.
- You will also want to go to the Schedule page and create a new line for the new page, with a link to it. Before you go there, copy the URL for the new page. It can be copied from the “permalink” that appears at the top of the editing page when you were finished editing the page content, after you had Published or Updated the page.
Posting files to be linked to from the web page
Files such as lecture projections (PPT or PDF), or supplementary documents, or R exercises, or audio recordings, are not to be posted on the workshop blog. Instead, open the Google Drive for the fhleqg account, which is not a gmail account but a uw.edu account. It has the secret password we mentioned above.
Find the “Shared folder” and open it, then find the folder for this year (such as “2018”) and open that. Find the folder for the lecture or exercise, and open that. If it does not exist, right-click or Ctrl-click and choose New Folder, and give it the appropriate name such as Lecture 4.3.
Then you should be able to tow the file from your system onto the page and drop it there. You can change its name once it is there, if you want.
Getting the link for one of those files
But there is still the matter of getting the address of the file, and posting a link to it on the lecture or exercise web page.
- Open a window with the Google Drive page, with you logged in appropriately.
- Find the folder with the file, and open that folder.
- (You may need to do this only once) The files you put in the Google Drive folders should be accessible by anyone who has the link. This ensures that clicking on the link in the blog reaches the file. To make that select the file and click on the icon above and to the right that looks a person with a + sign on their shoulder. Choose the setting that states that “anyone with the link can view” the file (not just anyone at UW with a link).
- Right-click or Crtl-click on the file name.
- A menu will open. Choose “Get Sharable Link”.
- A box will open with the URL address for the link. Select it and copy it.
- Now go to the Edit screen for the blog page, in Visual mode. Have the text that will indicate the link selected.
- Choose the symbol for Insert/Edit Link, which looks like a little chain with three links.
- Insert the URL in the box provided.
- Press the return-arrow button which immediately follows the URL field.
- Don’t forget to Publish or Update the web page after that.