Earn Your Blogging Badge

Magic Macguffin campers are going to be posting a lot of content to their blog, sharing the things they create at camp, photos and videos and camp activities, writing letters home, etc. While would never suggest that there is one best way to write to your site (for that is what you are to learn as you go, to develop a style), below we outline some guidelines for being Blogging Champs based on our experiences.

Write in your own voice. This is not a blue book exam or an english essay- it is okay to be personal, to say “I”, to have a few typos, to be conversational. Let your personality come through, play with your writing voice. Write like you are telling a story, create an arc, a sense of play.

Grab ’em with a strong headline The title of your blog posts are going to be what people see as they scan ds106 content, so be creative with how you title your work. Do not just call it “Audio Assignment” or “Final Project”, play with the wording, use puns, make the title of what you write act like the trailer for a movie.

Use Media (a lot of media) This camp experience is all about creating and using media! Get in the practice of using images, embedded media in your content. WordPress makes it easy- for images, you can upload them directly to your post (see the little media button above the writing area), but for the content you are creating on social media sites like flickr, youtube, etc, it is even easier using the automatic WordPress embed options.

For photos stored in flickr, just put the URL (plain text, no link) for the web page that contains a flickr image in a blank line, e.g.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7202153@N03/493046463/

will embed the image like

Grand Canyon - Lower Tapeats Campground at the Colorado River

Be sure to remove any extraneous “in/photostream/” part of the URL.

The same goes for video hosted sites like YouTube and vimeo, just the plain URL (do not use the youtu.be short form and remove all by the basic URL like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYqvGWBkiBc

which can embed a video like this

Unfortunately, Soundcloud does not do automatic embeds, so you will have to click the “share” button from a track and copy the embed/widget code. When you are editing in WordPress, you will have to switch to, or be in, HTML editing mode so it understands the code. It should look something like:

<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F44576539&show_artwork=true&oauth_token=1-16343-3573640-d20200618cb214ca"></iframe>

which will produce this when your blog is published

Use media as a means of communicating, making metaphors, or just referencing content you have used for your work.

Link, link, and link The web is a web because of its hyperlinks- when you write and refer to things that have more information (something from this site, a movie title, a song name, a political character), add links to provide pathways for your readers. Link to your previous work that is relevant. Link to other blogs from students in class. Link and link often.