Blogging for Scottsdale Community College

I am learning about WordPress and writing a blog in response to the request by my teacher. First off, I’ll comment on what I learned about the WordPress WP-Admin panel, which is a vital part of the interface between the user and the website. First, there are a couple of ways to get to the WP-Admin panel. Upon login, my favorite way is to go to the little photo of myself in the upper right corner of the page (which shows my photo, via my Gravatar credentials). Then, a window opens to the left of my screen and there are a variety of options on the menu. From there, I can go to Pages and add a page, or go to edit the setup for the Pages I have added.

I have played around with many of the Screen Options and also added a page for Posts, and I imported the text from a recent article. I like the easy way that you can add, edit and so on. In fact, the whole Admin panel is easy to use. I have clicked on every menu item in the WP-Admin panel and I believe that I am beginning to get a handle on how they work. There are still a lot of things that I need to read about and understand, but I think that those will become clear soon.

There are three things that I have learned about blogs from Chapter Three of our text book. For one, I have learned that there are various ways to Edit a blog. Chosing Edit, for example, is different in many ways than choosing Quick Edit. Quick Edit appears to be a tool for only limited purposes. I have used Edit to add additional text to this block and to make any necessary changes in appearance (such as centering text, or aligning to left (as this text is set up. Secondly, I have learned that you can add photos relatively easily to a blog, and I have found and identified valuable photos for my upcoming blogs from the suggested website, Pexels. I am building an image library in my WP folder and preparing some of my older articles for publication. Right now, I am interested in finding a way to build a menu of my articles on the main page, and then have a short one-para excerpt there with a “Read More” indicator. I’ve learned that this can then take the reader to individual blog posts. Some of them might have an image that I bring into the WP site via my library, a URL and so on. I have also learned that each of these photos is a block of its own, and you can change the block type if you want — or you can edit the photo via tools in the WP software. The three little dots also bring you some additional options. All in all, the block editor is a very comprehensive tool.

My favorite quote: “A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.” From James Allen, a philosopher and written who lived in Britain in the early 1900’s. His book, As a Man Thinketh has been translated into many languages and has been continuously in print since 1905.