Media Chatter

Rather than always requiring your readers to hop over to another site to get linked information, you might consider quoting parts of a story or blog entry.

This is accomplished with a combination of <blockquote> and </blockquote> tags, which will set the quoted material apart from your own comments.

For example, Volokh offers this reason for the growth of bloggers’ audience:

Thorough coverage of a particular issue: A blogger who’s interested in an issue may cover it in more detail than a typical newspaper would.

You might then follow that with your response to the idea.

You can monitor what’s happening in your LAL section by using the RSS feed your site will generate. Many portal sites, like MyYahoo, offer members the option of adding their own news feeds. Some of the newer browsers (Safari, Firefox) also let you access RSS feeds quickly and easily. To add your LAL site to such a site, you’ll need to know the RSS feed URL, which can be found by clicking the “Entries RSS” link on the bottom of the right-hand menu.

The link should use the following code:

http://www.commajor.com/?feed=rss2

Find the Register link at the bottom of the right hand column. Enter any username that you’re likely to remember. The system will generate and send you a password.

After a few minutes, check your email and continue the login. Before posting your first article, click the Users tab so we know who you are. First, enter your first and last names in the first two fields, then click the “Update Profile” button at the bottom of the page. Second, and before you leave that page, change the “How to Display Name” menu to display your first and last names. Click “Update Profile” again.

From now on, you will mainly be accessing the Write tab when you log in. If you are on your own computer (not in the lab) you may want to use the WordPress bookmarklet, which is displayed at the bottom of the writing page. With this in your bookmark list or browser window, you can simply select the bookmarklet while you’re reading a news story or another blog, and the browser will open a writing page for you with the URL already formatted for you. If you highlight a paragraph or two in the article you plan to link to, the bookmarklet will create a blockquote for you. Now all you need to do is alter the title, change the link text and add your own comments.

The meat-and-potatoes entry for blogs consists of a link to another blog entry, website, or news article.

For example, Eugene Volokh discusses why people like to read–and write–blogs.

Try to make your link as specific as possible. Instead of pointing to the entire site (e.g. www.volokh.com), point to the specific article–in this case: http://volokh.com/posts/1113000593.shtml. You can often find the article’s unique URL by clicking on the title or looking for a permalink.

If you find a link to an interesting article at another blog (including other LAL bloggers), blog etiquette expects that you credit the site that first showed you the link. In this case, I might do it like this:

Hat tip: New Media Journal

The composition page will also give you an option of a trackback to the blog you are citing. Whenever possible, enter the article URL or, if the blog lists it, a unique trackback URL in the trackback field. This alerts the cited blog that a fellow blogger has created a link to his or her post.

To offer more than a basic unlinked post, you will need to format your entries with some basic HTML.

To create a link, the syntax is

<a href="http://www.thesite.com/folder/page.php">Here’s the linked text</a>

Keep the linked text brief because it does not always wrap to new lines well. A common error is to list the link as www.thelink.com; remember to begin all your links with http://. The URL needs to be enclosed in quotes. To save your readers from frustration, test your links when you publish your post.

To create a blockquote section, the appropriate syntax is

<blockquote>Here's the quoted section.</blockquote>

As with the link code, the ending brackets always include a backslash: /.

For more information, check Wordpress documentation.