This page is a helpful guide to navigating the course webpage, as well as a starting point for anyone who needs a few hints for using WordPress.

Starting Out

If you are brand new to using WordPress, you may find these guides helpful: WordPress Lessons , or Learning WordPress.

Posts

Blog posts (not pages!) can be used to write about your work or any interesting/relevant ideas you come across during the course. To make a new blog post, log in to the webpage, visit the menu at the top left of the page (design, place & social innovation), and select New > Post.

Images

Most common image formats can be included in your blog posts by using the “Add Media” button in the top left of the WordPress post editor. Clicking this button will take you to an archive of uploaded images for the entire course blog. Add your own image either from a file on your computer, or from a url (make sure you have permission to repost it!), and then click “insert into post” at the bottom right of the window.

Links
Links can be included in your individual blog posts, but links that you believe would be useful resources for your fellow classmates should be added to the Links archive in the course website menu. To add a link, select the appropriate page (Article, Movie, Audio, Photograph, Etc) from the menu, and then ‘edit’ that page by clicking the link at the bottom of the page. Paste your link at the top of the page (so the most recent links show up first!). Feel free to include screencaptures, text excerpts, or embedded videos/audio along with the URL.

Making Links Open in a New Tab/Window
If you want the links you add to the archive (or your posts) to open in a new window by default, you can use the ‘text’ tab at the top of your post editor to type HTML directly into your post. Don’t know any HTML? No problem. You don’t need much.

Say you wanted to get to http://www.google.com.

To tell your wordpress post that this is should be a hyperlink, you need to wrap your link in tags, and so you’d type something like this instead (without the spaces):

<a href=” http://www.google.com “> </a>

But! That’s not quite good enough. Now wordpress knows that your text is a link, but you need to call your link something, so that people have a physical link to click on. You can use the URL itself to name your link, or come up with a more descriptive name. Check out these examples:

<a href=” http://www.google.com “> http://www.google.com </a>
<a href=” http://www.google.com “> This is Google. </a>
<a href=” http://www.google.com “> I swear this is totally not Google. </a>

One last step, then. To get the link to open in a new window or tab, we can add a ‘target’ for the link to look for. If we give the link a ‘blank’ target, it goes to a ‘blank’ or new page. Just add (( target=”_blank” )) — no parentheses! — right after your URL, and you should be golden.

Definitely not Google.