ESCI435/535: Landscape Ecology

Using Wordpress: I’ll be learning all of this right along with you.

Last Updated: 9/15/2014

Becoming a User: During the first week of class, you will receive an email from me inviting you to become a User/Editor/Contributor to the site. This email will instruct you to first go to Wordpress.com to create a user account. When doing so, you will select a username. This can be your actual name or a nickname of some sort. Keep in mind that visitors to the site (both classmates and those outside the university) will be able to see whatever username you select. You may or may not want your real name out there. This is entirely up to you. However, you will need to let me know your username so that I can track your contributions to the site. Your contributions to the site will be the basis for part of your class grade. After you create a wordpress account, you can accept the invitation to join the blog. After doing so, you will see a screen that looks something like this:

This screen is known as the “Dashboard” and it will allow you to do all sorts of stuff. For starters, it might be nice to actually view our current blog and I feel that it is best to open up a new tab in which to view it. To do this, move your cursor to the blog name, “landecolwwu” in the upper left corner of the screen and right-click and go to “Open link in new tab.” When you go to this new tab, you will see something that looks like this:

You will note that there are two pages, a “Welcome,” which briefly describes the site, and a “Home” page, which is where you will be adding your Posts. Note that I have already posted a sample citation on the “Home” page.

Adding a Post (a Citation): Back in the Dashboard, go to Posts-Add New. This will bring up a window in which you can load your citation. You can either type it in directly here or you can compose it in another word processor (such as MS Word) and copy/paste it here.

Tags and Categories: For each post you can attach “Tags” and “Categories.” We will use the Categories to divide all posts by the week in which they were submitted (Week1, Week2, …). The tags will be selected from the keywords that you came up with for your citation. For each citation, select three keywords (a keyword/tag could be a short phrase) to assign to it. As we begin to accumulate more and more citations, you can sort the citations by category or you can select citations that have the same tag (ex., disturbance). One nice feature of the tags is that anyone who does a web search using a term that we use as a tag will be able to see our blog and all of the citations that use this tag. Pretty cool!

At least five times this quarter, you will also write a 1-2 page summary/critique of the paper that you have read. I will grade these and get them back to you with comments and perhaps suggestions for revision. After making these revisions, I will ask at least some of you (maybe all of you) to go back and add this summary to your post.

Comments: Finally, I will expect everyone in the class to review all of the posts every week and provide a substantive comment on at least one of your classmate’s posts. I will track these comments and this will count as part of your course grade. We may also receive comments from people outside WWU who find their way to our blog.

D. Wallin