Blogging with page4

A blog could also be called an online diary. You write articles (also called blog or diary entries), that are automatically assigned with a date, and publish the articles online on a certain date. The blog only published articles that have a current date or where the date lies in the past. If the article has a date in the future, it automatically becomes visible for visitors on this date. If you click on the year, the month or the week, all articles that were published during this period of time are displayed in a list (depending on the setting and number it can be that only a part of the articles are shown and further articles of the month can be loaded subsequently), whereas the newest articles are always listed at the top. A click on the headline of an article only shows the respective text on the page, and expands the article by comments to this article and provides an entry mask for writing further comments. If you publish interesting texts, you will receive free of charge current content from your visitors in form of more or less extensive comments. Just like the blog entries, the comments are also managed in an own window, and there is the option of receiving an email if somebody commented on your article. By request, you can moderate the release of comments. The viewing and commenting of articles can be counted and thus provides the opportunity to summarize all entries that received the most comments in an extra navigation. Usually, a normal blog provides the opportunity to create a few "basic pages" for writing something about the author and the topic. This is not necessary in the page4 blog because the blog is completely integrated in page4 and one can thus create a fully-fledged homepage that can just be supplemented by a diary with a few clicks. Following this, we will show you how easy this is.

The top bar includes a new icon with an arrow. If you click on this icon, a menu appears from where you can conveniently access all options from the blog. Here you can activate the blog, write articles, manage comments and adapt the design. The blog itself, meaning the written articles, are only shown after you log off, by simply writing "/_Blog" after your address, or by clicking on a corresponding entry in the blog navigation. If you are logged in to edit your page, you can open the navigation of the blog, but it is not possible to call up pages, as you are otherwise automatically logged off. If you want to view own articles, you can click on an icon in the control part of the entries next to every entry, which then displays a preview in a new window.

In order for your entries to be shown, you must activate the blog. This option is available under -> Blog -> "Settings" on the first tab. Simply set it to "Yes" and your blog entries are visible.

Activating the blog makes the navigation of your blog visible on the one hand, and makes the articles available on the other hand. You have several options in navigation. If the design of your website has a sidebar or a lateral navigation, you can have the navigation of your blog displayed there, provided that the design used is already modified for the blog.

If you have a design that offers no room for the blog navigation, you can integrate it directly into the navigation via a special page. To do this, simply go to the page control and create a new page, and give it a name. In the editing menu you now see a further entry „Link to the blog“ under the item „Linking“ (there where you can also link to external pages). Select this option and save the page. If you call up the page (1) now, the normal standard navigation shows the years and weeks resp. months (2) as subpages and allow you to show the blog. Showing the articles is not intended. It is also not possible to show the special sections (most frequently viewed etc.) in the navigation. Of course, you can also use this option if you have a sidebar or lateral navigation. In this case you should make a decision whether you want to show the complete or partial blog also in these areas. As a standard, the system will show the blog navigation at the planned location (in the sidebar or under a lateral navigation) after activation. (3).

The settings for the navigation are located at -> Blog -> "Settings" on the second tab. (Top image). The navigation of the blogs is called an archive, as all entries are included sorted by date. By using the item "Navigation mode" (1) you can decide whether you want to have the weeks or the months shown underneath the year. The item "Display in the sidebar" (2) is the option we need to determine how the navigation is to be displayed. The image further towards the top showed you that you can integrate the blog archive directly into the navigation (a drop-down navigation in the example). As the design used has a sidebar, you can see that the archive is additionally shown in the sidebar. If you switch the option to "No", the display in the sidebar is hidden. Next to the archive, our blog offers the option of showing so-called top lists. One list consists of 2.5 entries (4). All in all, we planned 3 different lists. The list "Newest blog entries" always show the 2-5 most current articles, so that your visitors can call up new entries immediately- The list „Most frequently viewed“ shows up to 5 articles that were most frequently called up. Only clear visitors are counted. The third list shows up to 5 articles with the highest number of comments. You decide whether a list shall be displayed above or underneath the archive (the blog navigation) or whether the list shall be hidden. In order to address also the last item in this dialogue, it needs to be mentioned that you determine the labelling of the blog archive (3) by entering a text into the corresponding fields. As an example, we chose "My Blog".

After you have seen how to integrate the blog into the page, we will show you where and how you create own articles and what you need to keep in mind. The blog module is available for the free version as well as for the purchase version. However, we did include a limitation. In the free version, you write your articles with the slimmed-down text editor, while you have access to the full version with all options (incl. tables) in the purchase version.

The management of the blog entries is located under -> Blog (1) -> Manage Postings/Entries (2). A dialogue opens, showing all articles you wrote. If you have not yet written any articles, you will see an empty dialogue containing a link "Create new blog entry". (See image underneath the text).

As soon as you have written articles, they are shown in a list and are integrated in a navigation on the left side sorted by date. With this navigation, you can access all articles anytime. Of you write „on stock“, meaning write articles with a date in the future, the navigation will show you how many articles you have already saved for the coming months (1). Next to the navigation, all articles from the selected month (here in the image November 2010) are shown. The green arrow (2) in front of an article allows you to control the text directly in this overview. The articles are displayed chronologically, the most recent article is at the top (3). To the right of every entry you will see three icons. A magnifying glass (4), a piece of paper and a pen (5) and a wastebasket (6). With the pen you can edit an article, delete it with the wastebasket, and the magnifying glass shows the article in a new window, in blog display, just as your visitors see it.

To write a new article, simply click on the link "Create new blog entry". The overview disappears and the tiny text editor is displayed, which you already know from page4. The editor has some special features that we will explain shortly hereafter. Otherwise you can find detailed help under "Texteditor page4"

A blog article always consists of the following parts. a) a title. Write it into the field (1) above the text editor. The design of the title is determined by the website (headline) and can be overwritten partially in the settings of the blog. This is followed by the actual article that you can fill with images and videos (3). The date of publication and the time is listed above every entry. Enter the date on which your article shall be published into the field date (4). The format is (dd.mm.yyyy) , meaning the day has two digits, then a period, the month in two digits, another period, and then the four-digit year. As a standard, the current date is set. If you do not adhere to the formatting in this field, the system will delete your entry when saving, and replaces it with a correct, current date. This is also applicable to the time (5). The format is (hh:mm) meaning the hour in two digits, separated by a colon, followed by the minute in two digits. As you can see in (2), you have all functions available that you know from page4. However, there is an additional icon (1) to integrate images. If you click on the icon, you can integrate an image as before from the image overview, or upload an image directly.

It is recommended to only integrate images that are exactly fitting in size. If this is not possible, you can adapt the images in size in the editor by two methods. The first is to click on the image, this makes two grip tabs appear at each corner (1) and in the middle of each side (4). In order to adapt the image in size, click on one corner with the mouse, and pull the image larger (which is not good and lessens the quality) or smaller (2). A tooltip (3) shows you exactly to which size you are currently pulling the image. After you have reached the right size, simply let go of the grip tab. If you want to distort the image (meaning only change it in the height or width, then use one the grip tabs that are located in the middle of each side.

Another option is to change the image size via a dialogue. To do this, click into the selected image with the right mouse button and selected „Enter/change image“ from the menu. You can then enter and save a new size for the image in the dialogue that appears.

In order to integrate videos, you must retrieve the embedding code from Youtube or other services and then simply copy it into the text editor. There is one aspect in association with the editor that we have no influence on. Upon saving it for the first time, the editor does not fully recognize the embedded code and therefore does not show a video. You need to follow these steps to enable visitors to play the video in the blog. 1) Copy the code into the text editor and then 2) save the article. Important: 3) Open the article again and 4) save it again without changing anything. From now on, the code for the video is integrated and recognized, and is played on the website.

The online diary is very easy to operate. Activate the blog and write articles. That’s all. The blog does everything else fully automatically. It designs the articles, sorts them by date and published them on the desired date. Still, there are extensive options to adapt the blog if you want to. Please see the following list for a short overview of all possible options.

1. Blog active ?
   As a standard, the blog is deactivated. You can change that here.
2. Posts per page
   Selection of how many articles shall be displayed on a page.
3. Sharing active
   Turns the list with sharing providers on or off.
4. Allow comments
   Allow comments
5. Moderate comments
   No means that comments are published immediately. Yes means that you must activate a comment for it to be visible for everybody.
6. Email notification
   If this option is on, you will receive a notification for each comment.
7. Send Email to
   If the field is empty, the email address with which you registered your page is used, otherwise the blog uses the email saved here.
8. Comments per page
   Here you can determine how many comments are visible at the same time.

Apart from purely private diaries, nearly every user that has a blog wants his articles to be read by as many people as possible. A good way to do this is to enable visitors that find the article interesting to share is with others. This is very easy with the blog of page4. You can show a tool bar underneath the article, so that the visitors must only click once in order to share your texts on Twitter, Facebook and other services (more than 300 different platforms are offered). This is a great way to share and your visitors will appreciate this service. The toolbar we installed is supplied by an external provider. For example, in order for you to be able to share an article with Facebook, Facebook must be available and you must be logged in to your Facebook account. If services are not listed, they may be temporarily not available. As it does not make sense to share an entire blog (it is better to subscribe to an RSS Feed to do this), the toolbar is only displayed if you call up the individual article. Directly under the text and above the comments. We hope you enjoy sharing.

A great advantage of a blog is the opportunity to enable visitors to leave comments. The comment function only appears if the article is called up and one can therefore see exactly how many comments an article received. Our system has protection against automatic entries, but it cannot prevent real people from leaving uncensored comments. Therefore, you have the option of moderating comments. This means that you decide whether and when a comment is published. Articles that were not published are not counted.

If you retrieve an article by clicking on the headline, your blog message will be displayed on the page all by itself (1) . Below that, you can see the bar for sharing your article, if you have activated the function. The first image above shows an article that has not yet received any comments (3). Visitors can use the comment form (4) to leave a comment, meaning to „send“ it to you (5) with the hope that you will publish this comment. If your article is received well and several comments are left, this is displayed (6). In our example, 11 comments were written and published. As the settings on the website determine that a maximum number of 10 comments are to be displayed on a page (optional choice 5, 10, and 25), the blog automatically creates 2 pages, shows you the current page (7), and gives you the option of retrieving the other pages with further comments (8).