More on writing and designing your blog

You will notice, perhaps, that so far my blog has looked pretty boring. That is about to change. Pictures, fonts, colors, highlights - you can use all of these things to make your blog interesting. I am using the toolbar right over this box, where I selected a font using the fancy F and pulling down to Courier. I also set the box that usually says "Normal" to "Subheading" for this paragraph, so the text is large and bold. The next few graphs are done using the same font and the "Minor heading" setting, which automatically makes it bold and uses a font size that stands out on the page. 

This picture comes from the Creative Commons collection, here. When you get to the main page, which you can also find by just Googling "Creative Commons" you need to find images, since there are lots of things on there that are available for anyone to use, usually for free - sometimes there are conditions. So click on "Use and Remix" because that's what you want to do: find something you can use, alter perhaps, and put into your own website. Once inside there, scroll down just a bit to the Search box and enter "RNC Cleveland" (or whatever you want). It will then give you a bunch of confusing choices of where you want to search. I picked Flickr (Image) but there are lots of others you can try out. I found this photo that represented what I wanted to express: 

Photo by Erik Drost (Creative Commons license)

The conditions for this picture, I found when I downloaded it, which you do by clicking or double clicking on the picture, then hitting the arrow thingy over at the lower right in the black section outside the picture. See this screenshot:

Now, please also notice that underneath the black section, there is a gray bar and below the date on which the shot was taken is a blue link that says "Some rights reserved." Check that BEFORE downloading because it might say "This picture costs $100." You don't want to download it then. But if it says it's free if you "attribute" and "link to the license" like this one, then you just have to do that -- this is what I have done, right under the photo above (not the screen shot - the original photo). I put the photographer's name (that's attribution) and a link to the license. Make it a hyperlinked word by selecting the word and clicking on Link above. Make sure it's on the Web URL setting (not email) and enter the URL for the license, which you found when you clicked on it in Some rights reserved, right?

For some of you, my explaining all these things may be redundant because you already know them. But I have discovered a surprising number of students do not. Notice that the type here is back to "Normal" size, but it's still Courier font. 

The default font is this. Is it Georgia? This sentence is Georgia. Can you see a difference?

That's all for today, folks! Try it out yourselves and see how great your blog can look with a little creative work using the toolbar and the Creative Commons. it's all free!

Dr. B

PS (When I finished writing this and posted it, I discovered the coding doesn't leave lines between paragraphs as I had done in the original. I had to go back and edit it, adding an extra line after each paragraph, to look the way I wanted. Click on the little pencil icon below the post (which only appears if you're the author) to edit it.