Ref Pod Blog and Active Desktop
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Step 2. Create the Active Desktop

(Instructions for Windows XP)
1. At a reference PC workstation, right-click anywhere on a blank area of the desktop, and select Properties.
2.

At the Display Properties dialog window, click on the Desktop tab, and then click on the Customize Desktop button.
3. In the resulting Desktop Items dialog window, click on the Web tab. Here is a snapshop of the dialogboxes that appear when you create an active desktop.
4. To add a web page to the list of web pages, click the New button. You can either browse to the location of the web file, or cut and paste a URL into the location box. Click OK.
5. You will be prompted to respond to the following message: "You have chosen to make this site available off-line and add it to your Active Desktop interface. if this site needs a password, please choose Customize and enter it." Click OK.
6. Back at the Desktop Items dialog window.  Click OK, then at the Display Properties dialog window, click Apply.
7. Your new active desktop will appear on your desktop. You will probably need to resize the window so that the web page display is aesthetically pleasing.
You may want to go back into the Desktop Items/Web tab dialog window to tweak some of your settings:
Optional Step 1. You have an option to "Lock desktop items". You may want to do this to prevent users from resizing the active desktop.
Optional Step 2.

You may want to set your active desktop to refresh itself every nnn minutes, so that when blog entries are posted to your web page, the changes will appear in the active desktop. Refreshing the active desktop is separate from refreshing the web page you created in step 1.
  • In the Desktop Items/Web tab dialog window, highlight the web page line item, and click on the Properties button.
  • Click on the Schedule tab, and click Add to create a new sychronization schedule.
  • At the New Schedule dialog window, specify "Every 1 day at hh:mm" and provide a name for your schedule. Note that at this point you can only specify number of days, not minutes or hours. Time of day could be library opening time. Click OK.
  • Back at the Synchronize Favorites dialog window, highlight the new schedule name that you just created, and click the Edit button.
  • At the resulting dialog window, click the Schedule tab, and set the schedule Start time: (e.g. library opening time) then click the Advanced button.
  • At the Advanced Schedule Options dialog window, pick a starting and ending date, and put a check mark in the "repeat task" box and set task to repeat every 5 or 10 minutes until time of day (i.e. library closing time).
  • As you back out of all the open dialog windows click Apply, then OK at each window.
  • (Note: I have been able to make this work of some workstations, but not all, so it may not work for your environment. It is more like icing on the cake).
HINT: You can manually refresh an active desktop by right-clicking in the active desktop window, and select "Refresh." You can also hit the F5 key.

Go to step 3. Create the blog and invite some members.