U.S. Study Institute on Journalism and Media

University of Florida | 7 July 2008

Blogs and Journalism

WordPress Workshop

Start your own blog (hands-on): Go to WordPress.com and register for a free blog. Click the green button: Sign Up Now!

To log in, always go to WordPress.com (on any computer). After you log in there, you can open your dashboard.

  1. Dashboard: Here is where you make changes to your blog.
  2. Settings: Change title, tagline, time zone and language on your blog.
  3. Design: Change your Theme (blog appearance) or add new "widgets."
  4. Write: Create and publish a new blog post. (Adding images, links, etc., is done in the Post box when you write or edit a blog post.) Don't forget to write a good title.
  5. Manage: Edit or change existing posts.
  6. Widgets: These are objects, lists, or sections in your sidebar.
  7. Links (also called the Blogroll): Look under Manage, then under Links. This is how you add new hyperlinks to your sidebar. (NOTE 1: Make sure you have added the widget named "Links" to your sidebar! NOTE 2: To make lists in addition to "Blogroll," create new categories here, in Manage > Links.)

Resources and examples:

Class assignments:

Here is an assignment I gave to my students, requiring them to keep a blog for 12 weeks.

Blogging assignment for a journalism class at the University of Hong Kong.

RSS feeds and readers -- why and how to use them

How do people keep up with dozens of blogs? They subscribe to the blogs they like -- in their RSS reader.