| A few more things to do: |
| Start thinking about policies. Who should post messages? Should your blog be made public? or limited to just members? |
| Hint |
If you are new to blogging, create a practice blog where you can test new settings and tempates. |
| Under the Blogger Settings tab there are several tabs to configure. These are the ones I think are most critical to an active desktop environment: |
| Basic |
You can set your Add your Blog to our listings? to NO if you do not want to make your blog public. A non-public blog can still be called by your active desktop and accessed by library users. By setting your blog listing to NO, it means that it will not be listed on Blogspot, nor will it be searchable. |
| Publishing |
If you did not jot down your blog URL when you first created it, your URL will be listed under the Publishing tab. This is the URL that will need to be added to your web page created in step 1. |
| Comments |
Do you want all users to be able to leave comments? The Comments tab is where you can set the comments to hide, or limit them to members only. |
| Site Feed |
Set Publish site feed to Yes. Set Descriptions to Full or Short, depending on your preferences. Note your Site feed url. This is the url you will need to add to your .RSS java script in step 4. |
| Members |
You will need to invite members who will be allowed to add and edit postings. Invitees will receive an email message from you and from there, will follow a link back to Blogger to activate their membership. If an invitee does not yet have a blogger account, he/she will be prompted to create one. You can also set the administrative privileges for each member under the Members tab. |
| Who should have administrative privileges?
Note that only administrators can edit and delete postings made by everyone. Regular members can only edit and delete their own postings. It may be desirable to make everyone an administrator so that if someone posts a notice regarding a database problem, someone else can edit that posting later when the problem is resolved. On the other hand, blog administrators have the power to add and delete members, set configuration settings or even delete the blog. Choose wisely.
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