Blogivists HQ

Want to add an image to your blog? You have two basic options.

1. Upload it from your computer.
   • If the image isn’t already on your computer but somewhere online, right-click on the image and select “Save Image As”. Save the image somewhere on your computer.
2. Grab the image’s URL online.

Personally, I always go with the former route. Why? There’s no guarantee the image will remain hosted at the site in question; the owner, after all, could decide to delete or move it.

In any case, I’ll show you both ways.

Adding an uploaded image

1. Once in your admin, go to the “Write” tab.
2. Click on “Post”.
3. Click on the sun icon (located directly to the right of the words “Add Media” on the upper-right hand side of the text box).
4. A pop-up box will appear. Click on “Choose files to upload”.
5. Another pop-up – this one your PC file manager – will appear. Choose the image you want in your post.
6. Once the file has uploaded, scroll down and choose the particular options you want. Click on “Insert into Post”.

Adding an image via URL

1. Find an image online and copy its URL.
2. Once in your admin, go to the “Write” tab.
3. Click on “Post”.
4. On your toolbar, click on the “Edit/Insert image” icon (represented by a tree).
5. Paste the URL in the “Image URL” section.
6. Hit “Insert”.

As always, here’s a video tutorial for those of you who learn better with visuals:

They tell me diversity of thought is good, an end in of itself. That it may foster critical thinking skills – and, thereby, work as a means towards ultimate truth – is both incidental and bordering on the irrelevant.

Now I don’t buy into the relativistic claim but, as it turns out, blogivists.com is ideologically diverse! I mean, don’t get me wrong – everyone here believes that government is, more often than not, the anti-solution but even so, there’s quite a bit of variety here when it comes down to the specifics.

To demonstrate, let’s look at the past couple months. I’ll name a few issues and give you a couple pro and con posts from within the Blogivists community. Hot dawg!

(Man-made) Global Warming

Pro:

• projectpetition is pure HORSESHIT! – The Midnight Rider (7/10)
• Breaking Down the Global Warming “Debate – The Midnight Rider (8/06)

Con:

• Man-made Global Warming Consensus Disintegrating – Principle Over Party (7/17)
• Change the Climate Change Debate: Reality is not a Democracy – Extremism in Defense of Liberty (8/08)

Open Borders

Pro:

• GET THEM OUT: Border Jumpers Ruining Our Economy – Liberty is for me (7/7)

Con:

• Hispanosupremacists Infiltrate Evangelical Movement – The Epistolizer (7/12)
• Libot Media, Always On The Side of Illegals – Malignant Liberal Idiocy (8/17)

English as the National Language

Pro:

• Does Anyone Speak English Anymore – In my right mind (7/9)

Con:

• On Liberty, Ideology, and some R-E-S-P-E-C-T – Pragmatically Political (7/10)

Bob Barr

Pro:

• Bob Barr is my homeboy – Nicky Cheese (5/26)
• “McCain fundraiser” – Standard of Living (6/27)

Con:

• Why Bob Barr is NOT your homeboy – Pragmatically Political (6/29)

The Republican Party

Pro:

• The Republican Brand is not Dead – Free Thought for Self-Restrained Minds (7/17)

Con:

• GOP collapse: Should we groan or cheer? – Eric O’Keefe (5/19)
• Limited government no more – The Silent Majority (6/18)
• More signs that Republicans still suck – Eric Odom (7/29)

There you go. And that’s just off the top of my head. Really! So, what I’m getting at here is: with a more thorough internal investigation, we could probably apply for some kind of government subsidy…

Haha. Just kidding! I think that’s one specific we’re unanimously against.

Cheers…to truth and liberty!

Categories are a great way to sort your blog posts. They are umbrella terms that particular posts are thrown into in order for you (and your readers) to quickly pull up content limited to a certain topic. Clicking on a particular category will retrieve all the blog posts classified within that category. It is worth mentioning that, if a reader is unable to determine a blog’s different beats, he or she can quickly figure it out by glancing at the categories.

Adding categories to a new post

• While writing a new blog post, you will notice the “Categories” box, directly below the “Tags” box which is directly below your content.
• To add a new category, simply click “Add New Category”, typing in the name of the category and then clicking on “Add”. If you want the new category to be a subcategory of a parent category, use the drop-down menu before clicking “add”.
• To put a post under an existing category, simply check the box of the appropriate category. (Multiple categorization is totally legit so check as many boxes as you like).

Adding categories to old posts

If you wish to go back and place old posts in categories, you don’t need a time machine.

• From your Control Panel, click “Manage” and then “Posts”.
• There, you’ll see all your old posts and the categories each is in.
• Click on the title of the post you want recategorized.
• Scroll down past your content and the “Tags” box unto the “Categories” box.
• Check off, or add, the categories and click “Save”.
• Lastly, brag to your friends about not needing a time machine!

You can be as straight forward or as unique as you want with your categories. For example, Mark Block takes the more traditional approach using general political terms (i.e. “voter fraud”, “global warming”, Wisconsin politics”) while Liberty Girl has a more informal, emotive way (i.e. “lame!”, “shut the eff up”) of categorizing posts.

Hey. Just because we encourage organization, doesn’t mean we encourage conformity. Remember: you aren’t just a blogger, you’re a Blogivist!

UPDATE: I thought I’d add a little how-to on adding the “Categories” Widget…

Adding the “Categories” Widget

There is a widget that will display all your categories in a neat little section, so readers can 1. see all your categories and 2. easily pull up all the posts within a particular category.

• Click on the “Design” tab.
• From there, click on the “Widgets” option.
• Under the list of “Available Widgets” (left-hand side of the page), find “Categories” and click “Add”.
• Be sure to “Save Changes” (right-hand side of the page).

Now when you view your blog, you’ll see a widget titled “Categories” with all your categories listed (and linked) below…making your blog hyper-organized! Alright!

Here’s video to show you the – so to speak – categorical how:

Tags aren’t everything when it comes to conquering Google but – hey – without them, you’d be lucky to find your blog on Google at all. So if you aren’t using ‘em already, begin this second!

What are they?
Tags are the organizing mechanism of the blogosphere (and, really, the internet for that matter). They are specific keywords or phrases that accompany each blog post, thereby enabling keyword-based search and retrieval. By making information-searches much more accurate and useful, tags help in getting people to your blog.

What do they look like?
To give an example, a blog post on the 2008 presidential election might include “John McCain”, “Barack Obama”, “Bob Barr”, “electoral college” and other specific keywords that reflect the content and ideas of the post.

Why are they important?
Using tags is the easiest and most effective way to make your posts SEO-friendly. SE-what? Search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines, like Google, rank web pages according to relevance and popularity (along with a few other factors). If you don’t tag your posts, Google has little to work with in terms of determining relevance, and thereby, no way of connecting potential readers with your posts.

Thus, conclude that tags are necessary. Posts that are tagged will perform much better on Google than those that are not; posts that are tagged will bring in visitors who didn’t even know your blog existed! Wazoo!

How to do it?

1. After writing your totally awesome post, scroll just beneath the text box to the “Tags” field.
2. Simply type in a tag and press “enter”. And another! Then another! And another! And another!
3. If you want to delete a tag, simply click the gray “x” to the left of a particular keyword.
4. Once your post is complete, click on the publish button and revel in the improved SEO and ensuing web traffic!

As if those directions weren’t simple enough, here’s a tutorial:

Quite a bit of activity coming from Nevadan blogivists this week…

The Center for Yucca Facts made some noise when they presented a reasoned, anti-alarmist, alternative resolution to the Clark County Commission. For those of you unaware, CYF is a group that provides:

factual and scientific information on the proposed nuclear waste repository being built at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada…We believe the Nevada’s single-minded, unbending opposition to the Yucca Mountain project has not permitted a balanced appraisal of it.

Consider them the Bjørn Lomborg of the anti-nuclear movement.

Meanwhile, Sue Lowden, Chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, started a little brouhaha on the blog with her latest post, About Re-conveing the GOP Convention. Check it out. 67 comments and counting…which, being the self-absorbed blogger I am, makes me think I’m doing something wrong.

Sue, any chance I can get a blogging lesson sometime soon?

Speaking of comment envy, Miss Behavin’s now-classic I Hate Dell post of 3/20/08 is still getting comments. Talk about staying power — it should be entered in the Blogivist Hall-of-Fame or something. In an update late last week, ‘Behavin appears to have had the last word with the computer company. Yes, with consumer choice and contract enforcement, justice prevails in the market system.

The bureaucratic, government system, though? Well, let’s just look at Liberty Girl’s post on Senator Robert Byrd, also known as the Ultimate King of Pork. Here’s a system that promotes the acquisition of earmarks, that rewards looters such as Senator Byrd. With what? Specifically, how about:

a 10-foot, 1500 pound statue of himself in the state capitol building

And if that didn’t stroke his ego enough, there are more than 35 public-work projects named after him. You know, roads, public buildings, colleges, parks, awards, feats of science, etc.

Uh…yeah, I don’t quite consider that deserved, nor just.

Continuing on the theme of justice though, how about — as Liberty Girl suggests — we all promote this:

Give me your comments!