Some Blogging Basics

NOTE TO STUDENTS: COMMENTS AND/OR QUESTIONS POSTED TO THIS ENTRY DO NOT COUNT FOR GRADED CREDIT
Once you are logged in to Blogger using your SAU Google login, starting to write your blog post is pretty easy. Another way to sign in is to visit the blog website, and if you are not already logged in, you can click "sign in" at the top right of the screen, and log in using your "sau.edu" email address and email password.
If you have accepted the invitation to join the blog as an author, you will now see "International Trade Class Blog" in your blogroll and you can simply click the orange button with the pencil icon inside of it to create a new post. If you do not see this, and you have not accepted the invitation, then go to find the email and accept the invitation, or EMAIL ME requesting me to re-send the invitation.
Once you have begun a new post, there are a few things that I recommend. First, when you refer to an outside source (and you should always be incorporating some outside source to show a connection between the class theories and the real world), as I have done in today's post about industrial policy when referencing this article by Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind, you should embed the link into the text that you have selected by: (1) highlighting the text where you want the link to appear; (2) clicking the "Link" button at the top of the formatting bar in the "Compose" view of the post editor; and (3) pasting the URL of the web source you have mentioned in the box.
If you so choose, you can also upload images into your post by clicking the picture icon button (just to the right of the "Link" button"), then adding a link to a web location for your picture or uploading a picture into Blogger from your own computer. The same goes for videos (the button next over from the "picture" link. If your video appears on a website, but isn't available on YouTube, you can still embed it using by pasting the "embed code" from that website into the html code. I have done this for the "Daily Show" clip (which I know not to be available via YouTube) embedded below. This is slightly more advanced, but definitely doable.

Finally, if you really like doing your text editing in Word and not in your web browser, MS Word 2007 and up allows you to save your Blogger login information so that you can automatically publish to the blog directly from your Word application on your computer (and also save a local copy to your hard drive). In word, simply start as if you are going to create a new document, but instead select "New Blog Post" from the "New" dialog box. Word will prompt you for your blog's host (Blogger), as well as your login name/password. You may have problems linking the accounts if you maintain more than one blog with your "sau.edu" login name.