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Featuring our own Publius Forum, Defense Mechanism, Madison Classical Liberal, Let Them Eat Cake, & The Conservative Muse.

December’s Blogivist of the Month is… Madison Classical Liberal!

With the continuing intrusion of government into the private sector and plans for further economic planning supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, the month of December has seen the need for a more principled defense of free markets.

Thank you, Madison Classical Liberal, for your commentary and insight throughout these troubling times. Readers, if you haven’t already, check out his blog!

A blogroll is a list of blogs, typically located on a blog’s sidebar, that reads as a list of recommendations to outside readers. The list of links demonstrates a blogger’s interests, affiliations, and – moreover – connections.

Having a blogroll effectively tells your readers, “Hey! Here are some blogs that I like. Maybe you will too.” Furthermore, it communicates to those bloggers you put on your blogroll, “I really dig your site and think it’s worth mentioning to my readers.”

Found yourself on someone else’s blogroll? It’s definitely not something to take lightly; in fact, consider it a sign of respect and think about adding them to yours.

First Things First: Displaying Your Blogroll

In order to make your blogroll functional, you have to first add the “Links” widget. To do that:

1. Go to “Design”.
2. Click on the “Widgits” tab.
3. “Add ” the “Links” widgit (located on the left-hand side of the page underneath “Available Widgets”).

Good. Now the links you add will actually show up on your blogroll…

Adding Links

…so let’s do just that:

1. Go to “Write”.
2. Click on the “Links” tab.
3. Under “Name”, type the name of the blog or site.
4. Under “Web Address”, type the URL of the blog or site.
5. Click on “Save”.

Check out the video below if you’re still having trouble:

Adding Categories

Eventually your links may become too varied in scope. Say, for instance, you have a wiki (i.e. Ballotpedia) or a news sites (i.e. Drudge) on your blogroll. Those don’t exactly constitute blogs; so, you may want to separate them with categories.

1. While adding a new link, click on “Add New Category” (located underneath “Categories”).
2. Type in your new category. Your new link will be automatically be checked (and thereby, added to the category).
3. Save the link.

You can also categorize old links.

1. Go to “Manage”.
2. Go to the “Links” tab.
3. Go to the link you want to categorize and click on it.
4. Follow the same process as above, remembering to “Save”.

To see the last two processes, click on the video below:

…or at least to your blog anyway.

One of the things we pride ourselves in doing at Blogivists.com is providing our bloggers with an audience. By now, you’ve noticed that every time you write a post, it appears on the right-hand side of the main page under “livefeed”. And – along with the title of your post, user name and number of comments – lies an avatar.

Ava-what!? Avatar!

An avatar, for those of you unaware, is simply a visual representation of your blog that accompanies your posts and – if you allow them – your comments. It’s a great way to shape your online identity and attract blog traffic in the process.

Now every blogger at blogivists has a default avatar (see left), but – as you can see – it’s quite boring, and thereby, quite lame. So the ball is in your court. Get yourself a personalized avatar right now!

1. Once in admin, click on “Users” (located on the right-hand side of the page next to “Plug-ins”.
2. Go to the “Your Avatar” option.
3. Click on the “Browse” button and find an image saved on your computer.
4. Click on “Upload Photo”.
   • If no image appears, there is a problem with the file type or size. Choose another image.
5. Using the preview box, select the area you want to use as your avatar. (Notice that you can expand (or decrease) the size of the preview box.
6. Click “Continue & Crop” and do another step 5 for your “Alternate Avatar”.

Ava-awesome!

A video tutorial of the process follows:

UPDATE: I know, I know: “I’ve already tried to put up an avatar…multiple times! It didn’t work.”

Fair enough.

Here’s the problem. Your image must be larger than 500px x 500px. Anything smaller than that will simply not work. I know – the admin says “75px x 75px”. That’s wrong (and as soon as we figure out how to change it we will). For the time being though, make sure the image you use for your avatar is greater than 500px x 500px.

Want to make your blog posts more exciting? Want your readers to see – to experience – what you’re writing about? Of course you do! Appeal to the A.D.D. inside all of us by having video on your blog.

How did you do it? Here’s how to do it:

1. When writing a post, on the right-hand corner of the text box, switch over from the “Visual” viewer to the “HTML” viewer.
2. Find the video you want on YouTube (or the video website of your choice).
3. Copy the “Embed” code of the particular video. On YouTube, it is found within the video-information box (directly to the right of the video).
4. Paste the “Embed” code in your post (making sure you still are in “HTML” viewer).
5. Switch back to the “Visual” viewer. A yellow box will represent the video’s location within your post.
6. Finish writing your post.
7. Publish and bask in the adoration of a job well done!

As always, here’s some video to visually take you through the process:

UPDATE: On step 5, I mention that one can revert back to the “Visual” viewer after embedding in “HTML”. While, of course, you have the ability to do so, you should not. Not if you want your readers using Internet Explorer to be able to see your video.

For some reason, Internet Explorer will not display video properly if, after embedding video, you switch back to the “Visual” viewer. The very act, that of switching viewers, corrupts the code for Internet Explorer. So instead of seeing video, anyone using Internet Explorer sees a blank, white box. Strange, I know.

Note: this is not a problem for anyone using Firefox (or any other browser, besides IE). These people will see video properly no matter how the author embeds code. However, given that a large percentage of the population still uses IE, it’s probably smart to always make adding-video your last step.

Here’s the step by step:

• Complete all work on your post.
• Embed the video and then click “Save” or “Publish”.
  
• If for any reason you need to go back and edit features of an old post, copy first and then cut the video code, re-pasting it into its previous position after all editing work is complete.

There you go! Here’s a video tutorial to demonstrate getting past the IE conundrum: