1. Take a photograph of your “Public History in the Wild” subject (i.e. do not download a photograph from the internet). Get creative or artsy with it – go wild!
2. Draft and Edit Your Post.Until you’re really good in WordPress (and even when you are), I highly recommend writing your posts and saving them as Word docs first. Do all your editing and revision there, and only upload your entry when you are completely ready. Blog posts should be less than 100 words and written for a public audience. Think about what someone would need to know to make sense of your subject matter: location, dates of interest, importance on a local level, broader impacts, etc.
- Regarding Citations. If you look up additional information about your historical artifact, you must cite your source. If it’s a website, you can just hyperlink to the webpage within your text like I’m about to do when I tell you that there are very good reasons to cite your sources. <– see what I did there?
- If your sources are analog (like a print article or book), then you can use whatever citation style is appropriate to your field. For example, historians would use the Author-Date System from the Chicago Manual of Style for blog posts. <– oops I did it again
3. Sign into WordPress and familiarize yourself with the Dashboard.
4. Create a New Post. When you copy and paste directly from a Word doc it may screw with your formatting, so just double-check that everything looks right by previewing your page.
5. Add Your Media. You will need a minimum of two photographs. The first photograph will be the image you embed in your blog post. The second photograph will be your Featured Image that will appear as your click-bait image on the blog itself.
6. Categorize Your Post. Your posts must include the categories “PH Wild” and “Fall 2023.” You must also choose from the other relevant available categories. For instance, a photograph of an exhibition you visited about mushrooms at the Lloyd Library may also be categorized as “library,” “archive,” and “exhibit.” If you think there is a category we’re missing, you can propose an new one in class for review.
7. Tag Your Post. Your posts must also include a series of tags. These are more specific than categories. For instance, the tags for the previous example might include: Lloyd Library, mushrooms, or mycology.
8. Set Featured Image. Blogs are highly visual media. When you navigate to our blog page, you’ll notice that each of the posts have a picture associated with it. WordPress does not automatically populate this for you.
9. Publish Your Post. Ta-da! You made the internet go!
10. View Your Post. You should view the live version of your post to make sure everything looks good, nothing broke, your alignments are all where you want them to be, etc.
