Getting started
Welcome to UMW Lablogs!
This is a tutorial that will walk you through the process of setting up your own blog as well as customizing it to act as a repository for your labs. Most of what gets covered here is specific to the setup you will need to do for this class, to learn more about UMW Blogs and the specifics of WordPress (the publishing platform we are using) you can find the support and documentation pages here.
Step One: Get a blog
This is quite simple. Go to http://umwblogs.org/wp-signup.php and enter a username and your UMW e-mail (you will have to use your UMW e-mail, for this is the mechanism to limit who gets a blog to the Mary Washington community). After that specify a subdomain name and your blog title. After that your finished. You will receive two e-mails thereafter -one with a confirmation link and the second with your username and password.
Step Two: Change your password
It is probably a good idea after you get your blog to change your password to something you’ll remember. You can do this within the User tab by clickig on the My Profile subtab. More details for doing this can be found here.
Step Three: Activate the WP-Autoblog Plugin
Next thing you should do is go to the Plugins tab and activate the plugin titled WP-Autoblog. Plugins provide additional functionality to your blog, and this plugin in particular will allow you to bring the work you do in your biology lab into your own web space. Once you activate this plugin, you can find the control panel for this tool within the Options tab.
Step four: Adding the URL (or XML feed) for your personal lab to WP-Autoblog
This step may seem the most abstract, but it is actually the logic behind having you get a blog. WP-Autoblog is the tool that will include your online lab work into your own personal web space (your lablog). Professor Gallik will be providing each of you with a unique URI that is actually a XML (Extensible Markup Language) file that will format your work in very specific ways so that it can be exporting to a variety of different locations on the web (for example this blog).
The URL will look something like this (but it will not be the following nor will any two students have the same URL):
http://www.gallik.umw.edu/DLS/DLM_CellBi…
Once you have this URI, you will copy and paste it into WP-Autoblog which, once activated, can be located in the Options tab –> Wp-Autoblog subtab
. Click on the image below for more detail:
Click image for larger version
As you can see from the image above, you need to take the URI for your lab work that prof Gallik provides you with, and copy it into the text box on the left-hand side directly beneath “The Basic Settings” header. Two important things to keep in mind here: 1) Save the settings before running the script, and 2) don’t run this script until you have saved your settings. 
Go that!
Once you have copied in the URI and saved the setings, run the script. After that every time you complete a lab in Professor Gallik’s online Laboratory Suite, a link to the lab will automatically be populated in your own personal blog. Pretty cool, no?
Step five: Changing the default category of your blog
The next thing you should do is change the dewfault category for your blog. Right now it is set to uncategorized. Go into the Manage tab and click on the subtab Categories.
Click image for larger version
Click the edit button to the right of the Category titled uncategorized and change this category to lablogs (one word).
Step six: Record the URL of your blog in the UMW Wiki page provided
Finally, once you have created your blog and followed the above steps, copy the url of your blog (i.e., http://myblog.umwblogs.org) into the following page–which is a wiki page and can easily be edited by clicking on the edit button in the right-hand sidebar:
Comments»
a bit confusing but i think i got through it
Completed.
@chousley: Excellent. If you can give me an idea of what was confusing that would be great so that I can streamline the instructions.
@dtcelll: Well done!
Fini!!!
I think I got it…
Okay, I’m pretty sure I did it all right…
You guys are on the way to becoming full-fledged Jedis!
Is this it! am I done or not, now how will i know that.
i did it!
is this working? I think so.
My laptop is currently out of commission.