In This Guide
Once you've logged in, the best way to get familiar with the system's features is to post an article. This section provides a step-by-step guide to the basics of posting and viewing an article.

·Getting to the Post Article page 

·Posting an article 

·After your article has been posted 

·Viewing your weblog 



Getting to the Post Article page

There are several ways to access the Post Article page. The most direct way is via the Navigation Bar, a menu that spans the top of every page in the Publisher Control Panel and allows you to navigate through the different tabs:

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When you click the Post tab, the Post Article page opens and you can start entering your first article.

The options under the Post tab allow you to select the kind of entry you wish to post. The default entry type is Article, which is an entry that is mostly or entirely text. The other types of entries — Photo, Music Review, Movie Review, and Book Review — will be covered in later chapters.

Other ways to post articles
You can also post articles by clicking the Post New Entry link on your blog's main page, clicking the Post An Article link on the Dashboard, or by using the Post menu of the Command Bar, a strip of controls that appears in the upper right-hand corner of every page in the Publisher Control Panel:

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To post an article, select Article from the Post menu. This has the same effect as clicking on the Post tab in the Navigation Bar.
 



Posting an article

For now, we'll concern ourselves only with the essentials of article posting. All the additional features of the Post Article page will be covered in the Posting Articles and Reviews chapter.

The Article Content section, on the left side of the page, is where you enter your article. It has five main parts:

·Article Title 

The article title typically appears at the top of the article, usually in a larger, boldfaced font. If you do not provide a title, the article will appear with the title Untitled on your blog. Titles can be a maximum of 254 characters long. 

·Article Body 

This is the actual text of your article. For all practical purposes, your article can contain any amount of text into this text area, as well as links, images, etc. 
The Article Body text area is designed to act as a text editor; you can use its buttons and menus to format the text of the article body. The text-editor functions of this field will be covered in depth in the 
Rich Text Editor chapter. 

·Attach File(s) 

You can specify files to be attached to your article by clicking the Attach File(s) link. When you click this link, a field appears so you can specify the full path to the file to be included with the article, or you can use the Browse button to search for it. If you want to attach more than one file, click the More button to create additional fields for specifying articles. To remove some or all of these additional fields (one at a time), click the Less button. 

·Excerpt 

When readers visit your blog's main page, they will see the most recently posted articles. If your articles are long, your page may become too large to digest at a glance. In such cases, you can use an excerpt — a small sample of the article or a summary. When you use an excerpt for an article, the excerpt appears on the main page, followed by a more link. Clicking this link takes the reader to a page that shows the entire article. If your article is short, you can choose not to use an excerpt by clearing the Automatically generate excerpt checkbox and leaving the excerpt text area blank. 

·Publishing Options 

At the bottom of the Article Content section are two sets of controls that let you choose your publishing options. They are: 

·Publish this article / Finish this article later 
Use these radio buttons to choose whether to publish the entry immediately, or save it as a draft so you can work on it later. 

·Preview / Save / Cancel buttons 
The Preview button lets you review your entry before posting. The Save button either publishes your entry or saves it as a draft for later work (based on your choice from the two options above). 



After your article has been posted

Immediately after you publish an article, the Dashboard opens and an Article posted message appears. Your new article will appear in the Recent Articles list and the Quick Stats sidebar will be updated to reflect the fact that you have just posted an article. See The Dashboard for more information about this page.



Viewing your blog

There are three ways to view the main page of your blog from the Publisher Control Panel:

·Click the URL link. 

The URL for your blog is displayed just below its name in the Dashboard. 

·Click the View Blog link in the Command Bar. 

Unlike the URL, which is available only from the Dashboard, the Command Bar appears on every page in the Publisher Control Panel. 

·Type the URL into the address bar of your browser.  
Until they bookmark your blog, this is the way most readers will access it.