How to Blog to the Vanguard Website Guidance and Rules for Blogging on the Vanguard Website Version 1.01 March 2018
Step 1. Get an account The bristol vanguard website, like much of the internet these days, is based on a WordPress template and hosted using their services. This means anyone who wants to contribute must have a Word Press account. Use this link to get straight to account creation without it trying to force you to make your own new website https://wordpress.com/start/account/user You should be presented with a page like this It goes without saying, but you will need access to the email account you submit to verify the account before it lets you do much of anything. Step 2. Contact Vanguard and let us know you want to blog Once you are all signed up activated the next step is to get in touch with us and let us know a little about yourself and what you want to put onto the vanguard blog. To do this you can email the club at bristol.vanguard@yahoo.co.uk or use the contact us button the website itself https://bristolvanguard.com/contact/ In your message you need to let us know the following: 1. Who you are & what your association with the club or the bristol gaming community in general is. 2. What you want to post about. We would welcome almost anything hobby or game related. 3. Tell us what your Wordpress account name is. We need this to set you up with the privileges you will need to post. Within a day or so, we should be in touch either with some follow up questions, or more likely if you have given us the above with an email that looks like this:
Click Accept invitation and you will be taken to a page inviting you to make a WordPress account, ignore that and instead click to log in to your existing account, when you do you should hopefully be presented with this: Click Join and you are ready to go. Step 3. Check your homepage and review what you can access.
Once we have added you as an author, and you have logged in and accepted you should find that bristol vanguard has been added to your wordpress home page under the My Sites section of the header bar. Clicking there will let you see a few bits about the site traffic and browse the media library, but most importantly it lets you select the blog posts menu and see all the posts. That should look something like this As an author you can see all the posts, but can only edit or publish your own. You will see that all the posts are split into Published and Draft. Published is for posts that are live in some form, draft for ones that are work in progress. You can also click to filter between seeing everyone s posts, or just your own. Step 4. Create a new blog post This guide will be talking about creating a post from the desktop web version of wordpress, you may find that the freely available mobile, tablet or even desktop apps work better for you and much of what is presented here should carry over to those but obviously it will not be exactly as described here. That out of the way, log into your word press account and first make sure you have clicked on My Site in the top left, then click the add button next to Blog Posts on the left. This will create a new post and open up the wordpress visual editor. The layout and features of the editor should be familiar to most with experience using office type software so we will just go over the main things to be aware of here.
Visual / HTML The two tabs on the right hand side swap between the two modes. Visual uses the buttons and features you see in the screenshot, and is fairly similar to thigns like Microsoft word. HTML lets you use code to set up advanced stuff or get things exactly right. Unless you are a HTML guru or want to do something really fancy I suggest sticking to the visual editor. Title Type the title of your blog post into the section which starts out called Title. Dot Dot Dot The three dots on the right hand side expands the menu giving you some more options. Add Media To add media (Photos, PDFs, anything really) hit the Add button then select Media from the drop down list. You will be taken to a list of all the media hosted on the website, sorted by date. If what you want has already been uploaded before, you can scroll down to find it, or filter using the categories at the top of the page. If you need to upload something new, click the add new button and select it from your pc, note that you can select multiple items at once using the usual control and shift click options in window. If you want to point it to a specific item on the web hit the arrow next to Add New and put in the address. Once they are in the media library, for single items, you just need to select them and click insert in the bottom right. This will drop them into you post and you can drag them round and use the visual buttons to set them to align left right centre as usual.
If you select multiple items at once the insert button changes ot continue and it will instead create a gallery for you and drop that into your post as a single item. There are layout and ordering options that are fairly self explanatory. The Link to option sets what happens when someone clicks on an image in your gallery. In general you should set this to None (Nothing happens) or Media File (Takes them to a full screen view of the individual item). The Cog The Cog button on the top right opens or closes the side menu. Close it when you are working to get a cleaner screen. Open it when you want to configure the post. Side Menu: Status The first drop down box lets you configure whether this post will go live immediately (after you hit publish) or on a selected date. The second selects who can see the post when it is published. Public Everyone Admins and Editors As titled, good for when you want an editor to look at something Password Protected Creates a private post that when people visit it are prompted for the password. Can be useful for sharing a draft post with someone who is not an editor, but really should not be routinely used by us. Stick to Front Page As described. Do not tick this, our front page is set up to pull the latest posts with the featured tag automatically. More on that later. Pending Review If you tick this it appears in editor and above users to review list. Can make it easier for us to find something you want checked over before you publish.
Side Menu: Categories and Tags The category and tags options let you tell the website and readers what your post is about. Categories These are categories we have defined on the website and should cover common types of posts, for example Hobby. If you are planning to do a series of posts on one topic get in touch and we can create you ca category (for example I have one here for my Tyranid Blog). Pages on the site can be set up to show all the posts of a certain category. Tags These are descriptions that you can freely define for your posts. The list of ones that have been used before appear when you click in the box but use whatever makes sense. They tie in with the search function, both within the site and for things like google. The Featured Tag Special mention for this one. If you include Featured as a tag it will add it to the list of ones pulled to the front page image slider thing. Feel free to do that, as long as you have a featured image. Side Menu: Featured image This lets you set the featured image for you post. As described in tags, this is used by the website on the front page, but also on the blog page and anywhere else your post is featured. It s the picture associated with the post, make it a good one. Side Menu: Sharing If you have set up your wordpress account to connect your social media stuff they will appear here. You can also manually share the links later, usually with more control over where it goes (ie the Bristol Vanguard Facebook group rather than your personal timeline). There are tick boxes for whether you want share and like buttons to appear on the bottom of your post after you publish. Side Menu: More Options A few more options here: Slug Turns your title into a computer friendly version with no spaces or illegal characters. Ignore mostly. Excerpt This is the short description of your post that will be pulled to appear in various places (on the list of blogs, social media link etc). If you leave it blank other bits of the website may pull the first however many words from your post instead. Best to stick something short and punchy in. No more than a couple of lines. Location Lets you add a georeferenced to your post, not one we will commonly use I suspect. Perhaps if you are a talking about a place or event you went to. Comments Select whether you want people to be able to comment on your post or not. Pingbacks and trace backs enable or disable these. Basically, they are techy things in the background that tell other blogs / websites If you have linked to them in your article.
Copy Post Handy feature that lets you avoid setting up all these options every time for every post. Select one you have done before and it will pull it all across. Publish, Preview, Close or Delete When you are done working on a post there are 3 thigns you can do. Close found at the top left of your screen, the close button will take you back to wordpress home page and save your work to the drafts section. You may get a pop asking you if you are sure you want to do it, don t worry, it does save it as a draft when you hit ok. Move to trash Found on the bottom right of your screen, this deletes the post. Does not save to drafts. Preview Found in the top right of the screen, this pops out a new window to preview what the post looks like so far. Publish This publishes the post using the options you have set in the side bar. Until you have a couple of posts under your belt we would ask that you Publish to Admin and Editors rather than Public so we can have a quick look over your blog before it goes live. Always preview and proof read your stuff before publishing. You can make changes after it is live, by opening the post, hitting edit, doing whatever you want then hitting publish again, but its best to get it right first time. The Rules The reason we have set the website and the blogs up is to build a community resource for people share there hobby with each other and help new and existing member to keep up to date with what is going on. With that in mind the following rules apply: 1. All content published to the website should be appropriate for all members of our community. No offensive language or images. No adult only content. The administrators reserve the right to determine what is appropriate and edit or remove anything as needed. Repeat offenders will lose the privileges to post. 2. All content published to the website should be vaguely relevant. Talking about events, hobby progress, army plans, card games, board games, rpgs, anything like that is great. Talking about the best car to transport your models to an event is getting a bit off topic. Talking about cars in general is not on topic. 3. No for sale listings. There are other places to sell your models or services, please do not use this website for that.