Your first blog post using Movable Type

I had to very quickly bash out this ABC of doing the first blog post on MT today for one of our new bloggers.

Thought it might help someone else out there too so here it is. After all, it’s only simple when you know how!

To post;

1. Click on “new entry” in the left hand navigation.

2. Put a headline – simple and descriptive in the “title” field.

3. Paste, or type, your blog post into the box marked “entry body”.

4. Scroll to the bottom of the page – click preview to check.

5. Once happy with it, change the status from “unpublished” to “published” and click save. That’s it, all live on t-internet!

A few pointers

1. The main benefit/point of blogs is that they are easy to link to other sources of information. To do this, highlight the text you want to link then click the icon that looks like a chain that will open a little window where you paste the URL of the site, blog etc that you want to link to.
2. To add a picture or audio clip. Click on the upload file on the left hand navigation panel. That will open the panel below. You then need to browse to the location of the file you want to upload – and click upload.

The next screen gives you these options;

1. Select: “Show me the html”
2. Check “create a thumbnail image”
3. Change the pixels size – 300 at the max is about right for our page width.
4. Click embed image.
5. This will give you a string of code which you need to cut and paste into your blog post.
6. If you want to position the picture left or right, add in this additional piece of code <img align=”left”> or right etc. otherwise the image will sit centrally.