How do I offer a "Subscribe by email" option on an eduBuzz weblog?

Every WordPress blog offers, at a special address known as its RSS feed address, a list of the latest posts. How many are in that list, and how much information is included in each entry, can be tweaked (Options / Reading / Syndication Feeds).

 

That list of latest posts can be turned into an email newsletter using the free RSS to Email service provided by Feedblitz.

 

Benefit: People who don't have time to visit your site regularly will get an email notification, usually daily, every time new posts are added.

 

Basic steps are:

• Sign up with Feedblitz (free), and click the activation email you'll receive.
• Choose to Create a new Newsletter
• Specify the feed address of your blog as the info source: this is your blog's address with /feed on the end, e.g edubuzz.org/blogs/myblog/feed
• Design your newsletter
• Publish it and take a note of the email subscription link's address.
• Make that available to your audience in your Blogroll links.

 

You can go further and include the basic HTML for the Feedblitz button in your blog sidebar. To do that use a Text widget. The code in your widget will look like this

 

 

 <a href="http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=373625"><img src="http://www.feedblitz.com/i/da/373625.bmp" alt="Feedblitz button"></a>

 

 

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How do I create a link to something part way down a page or post?

You might want to do this, for example, if you've created a long page and want to create a set of "Contents" links at the top.

 

This is a two-step process:

 

• First,  place a special, invisible marker called an anchor at the destination location.

 

• Then, create a hyperlink which links to that anchor.

 

To create the anchor, go to the text, typically a heading, that is to become the destination. Here we'll use the text "Section 2". Use the Code tab to add an anchor like this:

 

<a name"section2"></a>Section 2

 

This creates an anchor named section2 just in front of the text. In the WordPress Visual Editor a small anchor symbol will be displayed, but the appearance of the live page won't change.

 

Next, link to the anchor. If we are linking within the same page, there's no need to specify the full address (URL) of the anchor.

• Select the text, say "Section 2" that has to become the hyperlink.
• Click the "Insert/Edit link" button on the Editor toolbar (it looks like a chain link).
• Type in the destination as #section2  (there is no need in this case to include "http://")
  • The # symbol denotes we are linking to an anchor.
  • In a similar way we can link to an anchor on a different page by simply adding the # symbol and the anchor name to the end of the URL for the page.

 

 

Finally, test it.

 

 

How do I include a table in my Posts or Pages?

This is quite easy to do, and more to the point, gives great results. Pop over to the Dunbar Primary Parents site to see an example.

It's done using a little HTML , but don't let that put you off. HTML is just a way of including labels (called tags) that tell your browser where the various building blocks of the table start and end. It's a bit like dictating a  description to a typist, and it's not as hard to learn as it looks!

 

• <table> marks the start of the table, and </table> the end of the table.

• <tr> marks the start of each row, and </tr> the end of each row.

• <td>marks the start of a cell (table data), and </td> the end of a cell.

You can find out more about using HTML for tables on tutorial sites such as HTML Dog.

 

Here's the code behind the Dunbar example which you could copy and paste to get started. A few lines have been removed to save space here. You'll need to switch off the normal visual editor as described above.

 

You'll see the <table> tag also tells the browser that the table should use the full width of the page (width="100%"), that it should be aligned to the left (align="left"), should have no border (border="0") and should not have any blank space, or padding, between the text in each cell and the cell's edge (cellpadding="0").

 

<table width="100%" align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">

<tr><td><b>Class</b></td><td><b>Teacher</b></td></tr>

<tr><td>Harbour Room</td><td>Ms C Gilfillan/Mrs L McPheat</td></tr>

<tr><td>Seashore Room</td><td>Mrs R Murray</td></tr>

<tr><td>Lighthouse Room</td><td>Miss E Skene</td></tr>

<tr><td>Castle Room</td><td>Mrs Imrie/Mrs Long</td></tr>

<tr><td>P1A</td><td>Mrs D Sheerin</td></tr>

<tr><td>P1B</td><td>Miss K Martin</td></tr>

<tr><td>P1C</td><td>Mrs C Dillon</td></tr>

<tr><td>P1D</td><td>Miss A Foster</td></tr>

<tr><td>P6C</td><td>Mrs D Wightman</td></tr>

<tr><td>P7A</td><td>Mrs J Legge</td></tr>

<tr><td>P7B</td><td>Mrs S Wong</td></tr>

<tr><td>P7C</td><td>Mrs P Melvin</td></tr>

</table>

 

The result should look something like this (except here width = "400"):

Class	Teacher
Harbour Room	Ms C Gilfillan/Mrs L McPheat
Seashore Room	Mrs R Murray
Lighthouse Room	Miss E Skene
Castle Room	Mrs Imrie/Mrs Long
P1A	Mrs D Sheerin
P1B	Miss K Martin
P1C	Mrs C Dillon
P1D	Miss A Foster
P6C	Mrs D Wightman
P7A	Mrs J Legge
P7B	Mrs S Wong
P7C	Mrs P Melvin

 

If you've got this far go and get a coffee - you've earned it!

 

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