cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by larrysphatpage
ABOUT YOUR BLOG – In week one’s assignment, you got your Domain and WordPress site up and running. Now it’s time to soup-up this blog into a real muscle machine. There are a number of things to do including editing default titles, posts, comments, and pages. Jim Groom from UMW gives a nice overview in the Week 2 assignment for DS106, but I’m going to summarize here as well.
1. Defaults – As I just mentioned there are a number of defaults to edit, specifically the Site Title, Site Tag Line, default post, default comment, and Sample Page. You don’t need to have your first post to ds106 be “Hello World!” so either delete that post or edit it. Nor do you want “Hi this is a comment” to be your only comment!
2. Appearance – There are a lot of ways that you can change the look of your WordPress site, primarily through the Appearance tab, and changing the Theme. You can search through and install themes that suit your taste, and many include a lot of features to change. Also you should look at Widgets as these are how you change the items that appear in your sidebars, and footer. I’m partial to aggregating other networks in my bar including my lastest Flickr photos, Tweets, and Diigo bookmarks. It’s up to you, make it your own space!
3. Plugins – This really should be first on the list, as it’s probably most important and described in the DS106 week2 assignment in detail. You can add a lot of functionality to your site by using plugins to add features. Jim lists the three most important, must have plugins which I wholeheartedly agree with – Akismet (comment spam filter), Subscribe to Comments (let’s readers subscribe to a post’s discussion), and Twitter Tools (allows you to display Tweets, automatically Tweet new blog posts, and more).
You can install plugins by searching for them in the “Plugins – Add New” page in the dashboard. Search for the ones above and any others that you’d like to use to extend the functionality of your site. A lot of plugins require configuration though after you install them. Twitter Tools requires you associate your Twitter account to your blog by using an API Key. API Keys are passwords associated with service you are connecting to your blog. Usually the plugin describes how to do all this in a settings page or in the plugin description.
Good luck and have fun modifying your blog and remember your site is about to be added to the main ds106 website feed.
Your first post is to be a response to the Gardner Campbell Essay, “A Personal Cyberinfrastructure” and the video of his presentation “No More Digital Facelifts.”
Both texts speak to a lot of the inspiration behind ds106 and students having “A Domain of One’s Own.”
ON THE DAILY CREATE – I have noticed a number of students are off and running with their services and feeding into the tdc.ds106.us website. Remember TDC is a regular activity to do throughout the entire semester, three times a week. You need to have Flickr, Youtube, and Soundcloud accounts to do assignments for TDC.
Be sure to tag photo and video assignments with the exact tag described. If you accidentally add a semi-colon or a period or add any other extra characters, your photos will not feed into TDC’s website. And often there is quiet a delay before your assignment appears in the feed for correctly tagged items – so it is with feeds, just be patient. And in the mean time, you should look at all the awesome work of other ds106 participants and comment on their stuff!
Comments
15 responses to “CUNY Week 2 – Getting Under the Hood of Your Blog”
Ive been uploading pics from my flickr account and tagging them the right way and also checked my account settings but my pics are still not being uploaded to the daily create, I can’t figure out what the problem is.
Can you send me a link to one of the images on flickr please?
Hey I’m also having the same problem.
Links to photos in Flickr please!!!!
my link snacks273@yahoo.com
Hi Alicia –
I’m actually looking for a link to one of your Flickr photos. Do you have one?
yes here is the link http://www.flickr.com/photos/76364669@N07/6853912855/
hey professor, i did three of the daily creats and tagged them but i dont see them on the ds106 page. i tagged them tdc32,tdc33,tdc34
Hi Sandra –
You need to check your privacy and permissions settings in your Flickr account and make sure you have sharing enabled.
I enable it to be shared,i still do not see the pictures on the daily creates
Hi Sandra –
Your tag is correct, but it’s not being included in the Flickr feed tdc37 for example:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/tdc37/
This means there has to be some setting in your account that is screwing this up. Can you take a screen capture of your account settings and post them as a Flickr photo and then post as a link here?
With me finishing the Gardner Campbell assignment that i posted on my blog, I was wondering if we have any assignments due this week since we didnt meet in class this monday?
Here’s this week’s assignment. http://www.michaelbransonsmith.net/blog/2012/02/15/cuny-week-3-web-2-0-is-an-attitude-not-a-technology/
Hello professor I’m unsure of what to do after I did the Gardner campbell assignment. How would I know if you have seen it? I am also lost with the tagging I did some of the daily creates but I’m confused on how to tag.
Hi Janelle,
I saw a link to your site http://nello.nelloworld.com in the form today, but it’s not working. Is that URL correct? Also the week three assignments are up. And for the daily creates, if you’re not sure how to tag a photo in Flickr, have you tried to Google it? Tell me what you’ve tried and send me a link to a photo on Flickr.