Taking the next step with your blogs

Your next assignment is to improve your blog and write another post. Here is what I would like you to do by 5 p.m. on Friday:

• Using the Links command in your Dashboard (you’ll find it in the left-hand rail), delete the links to WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Now build a blogroll of at least six links. One should be to the class Web site. The other five should be to your area of interest. (Example: the ESPN.com NBA page for a blog about professional basketball.)
• Using one of the two tools we looked at for finding non-copyrighted photos, Creative Commons or Wikimedia Commons, grab a photo that you will use with a blog post you’ll write. You can edit it with a simple tool such as Picnik, iPhoto or MS Paint.(You might also want to try downloading and installing Picasa, a very nice, free photo-editing program from Google.
• Write a blog post about your area of interest that links to and excerpts from at least three outside sources. Your post should include the photo that you found. When you upload it to your blog, make sure you write a caption. The upload command is the rectangle immediately to the right of “Upload/Insert,” above the blog-entry window  in the Dashboard.
• Assign a category to your post and at least three tags; you’ll find them in the right-hand rail of the Dashboard. If you found yourself confused by our discussion in class, please see how I use categories and tags at Media Nation. The basic rule is to be stingy with categories but profligate with tags.