What do the buttons mean in the composition editor on blogger?

Lesson Number 2:

For those of you who are keen to start writing your own blog posts, and adding content to your blog, here are some handy hints I wish I'd known when I started. 

Here I take you back to the Posting page.  

As I write on the blog post itself, this page is called a WYSIWYG Editor.  (What you see is what you get).  It is pages like this that allow the humble writer at home to set up free blogs.  Without this, it would be impossible but with this in front of us, we can post as many articles as we like. Easy peasy. 

A wysiwyg editor provides you with a page kind of set up like a word document, with some of the same symbols and buttons and you write just like you would in a word doc.  But there are a few more too. Shall I take you through them quickly?? 

 An explanation of the buttons.

From Left to right:

Arrow pointing left: This is like the 'undo' button, taking you back a step (or 2 or 3) If you have deleted or changed something, find it here.
Arrow pointing right: Same as above, but moving forward.

FONT. Click on the little downward pointing arrow on the right of the F for a drop down list of fonts you can choose from. I use Times on my blog.

tT  Choose the size of font you want by clicking on the down arrow and highlighting your pick.


B   BOLD  

U   Underline
ABC   This is for crossing out previous information or dates etc that you no longer need

A with black line under it:   Highlight an area and use this to change your text colour.

Marker pen:   Click on this and highlight an area to put a coloured shade behind your text

LINK:  When you click on LINK, this box below will pop up. A link is when you are talking about someone or something and want to share a website or a website page.  For instance, in my blog, I often talk about 'Blanket Stitching'. I simply write about my craft and when I am ready to write 'blanket stitch' in the sentence, I click the LINK box and add 'blanket stitch' into the 'text to display' bar, and the URL (address) of the blanket stitch page (http://www.mamamoontime.com/2010/02/how-to-blanket-stitch.html) into the box asking for web address.

If you wanted to talk about MamaMoontime for instance, you'd type MamaMoontime into your 'text to display' box, and www.mamamoontime.com into the web address bar. Once that is done, simply continue on with your sentence. Automatic links. No HTML code required.

These three are helpful too.
1. The one circled in red is the button to add your pictures/photos.  Simply click the link and then click 'choose files'.  This should take you to a page where you choose the place where your photos are stored. On Mac, it is iphoto, or Documents if you have exported your files to a jpg image.
2. The next one is to upload video. You can choose to upload video from Youtube, from your Youtube channel if you have one, or straight from your phone.  Just follow the prompts.  This saves you from having to find the code and imbed it yourself into the HTML page.
3. The third one is to break up your post. If you only want to display the first paragraph or two on the front page of your blog once you have a few posts on view, simply position your mouse in the spot in your post where you want to break it off. Click the link and a dotted line will appear. Up to this point is the only text you'll see on your home page of your blog. To read the rest, your visitors will need to click 'read more' which will appear automatically under your blog.  A teaser (such as one or two paragraphs on the main page) gives you the opportunity to showcase a wider variety of your recent work than if all your full article posts simply unfold down the page.  This means people will probably stay longer on your blog, and read more of what you write.  A good thing really.

And the last few buttons...

Alignment (Red)  Just click on the downward arrow to pull up your dropdown menu and click on what you need- left, right, centre or justified alignment for your page. I once had a reader email me to ask me to stick with left alignment always, except for crafty how-tos (where I use centred alignment under the centred photos) as this makes it easy for people to read. 

(Blue) Paragraphs 

1. beginning with numbers.
2. It also indents the paragraph slightly

(Yellow) Dot points

• Just like this
• and this

(Green) Quotes

indents the quote, Hi there!  You'll need to add " and " 

(Purple) Remove formatting.  I don't use this one, but think it means if you highlight an area and want to remove your bulletpoints, or italics etc, just click here. (Orange) Spell check. The only other thing to show you today is something I wished I discovered much earlier.  A hidden treasure.  The "schedule" button. Usually when you finish writing and editing your posts, you click PUBLISH and off it goes, live onto your blog.  But sometimes, you need to write in advance.  You can.  Just choose the 'schedule later' option. Never miss a party again  :) If you click on the 'post options' button at the end of your post, you'll see this frame pop up.  Click on the 'scheduled at' and these two white boxes will appear with today's date and time.  Just post date it for when you want your work to appear.  Then click PUBLISH and it will go into your storage file, waiting to publish on your blog at the selected time.

You can go back into your posts and write more, change things, edit your work etc by clicking on EDIT POSTS on the top bar under POSTING.  This will take you to your scheduled posts, as well as your drafts, and you can play around until you are happy they are ready.

So there you go. DO YOU WANT MORE?

If you do, please leave a comment and tell me what you want to learn....

Adding page elements (such as pictures or links in your sidebars)?
Add facebook pages to your sidebars?
Add images to your sidebar?
Adding a search bar or a list of your favourite bloggers?

Remember to leave a comment to let me know what you need or want to learn.