The ExplorOz Blog facility has been developed for
Personal Members and Business Members only. To create a new blog, you first must be logged into ExplorOz with your Personal or
Business Membership number. After clicking into the
Blogs Index page from the main menu, you will see a button called ‘Create New Blog’. Pressing this gives you the
Add/Edit Blog Entries page, and you should see fields in respective order: Entry Date, Title, Entry, Tags, Comments and Attachments.
The first text box is the Entry Date, which is automatically populated with the current date and time. You can keep this defaulted to the current date and time or change this date back in history, but you cannot forward date your entry. The next field is the Title and is where you can give your entry a good descriptive title using no more than 100 characters. The entry field however can be as long as you desire, and is where you type your blog. The buttons located under this large text box are
tools to help you perform certain functions such as: checking your spelling (Spell
Check button), inserting a link to an internal ExplorOz page or external web page (Insert Link), inserting photos or graphic images (Insert Image/File), inserting PDF and Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets (Insert Image/File), and embedding a YouTube or Vimeo video link (Embed Video). For more information see the FAQ that corresponds to these functions.
The next section is titled Tags, and is divided into ExplorOz Categories and General Categories. There are a total of 63 tags - 34 ExplorOz categories and 29 general categories to choose from. This is where you can place a tick in the tag checkbox that BEST describes your blog. You can choose multiple tag categories for your blog, but keep this to a minimum in order to uphold its category credibility, as this will help others to search for your blog by tag more accurately.
The Comments field allows or prohibits others from making comments to your blog entry. Placing a tick allows others to make a comment, while leaving the checkbox blank prevents the comments textbox from being shown, therefore stopping others from typing in a comment. You have total control to delete and reply to comments, and you can edit your blog at any time, including turning off comments if you no longer want any more to appear (although leaving the existing ones there).
All attachments are shown (comma delimited) in the Attachments field. Although this field looks like it cannot be edited - it actually can! What this means for you is that if you no longer want a file attachment shown in your blog, simply delete the file name from this text field.
The buttons shown at the bottom of the page are where you can preview your blog before submitting it (Preview button), submit your blog where it will now be live (Submit button), delete the entire blog from the system (Delete button), and go back to your own MyBlog index page (Back to MyBlog).