Commenting on posts on the CUNY Humanities Alliance sites and its course sites helps to make the site an interactive and engaging community. You may also be required to respond to the blog posts of other students in your class.
Your class may go over best practices of comments to make sure that the CUNY Humanities Alliance is a positive and safe space for people to share their thoughts.
Step 1 — Navigate to the Post
In order to comment on a post, you should first navigate to the page of the post. You can do so by clicking on the title of the post.
In the example below, the blog post is on a course site’s home page. You cannot comment directly on the post from the home page, but you can comment on it once you click the blog post’s title, which is underlined in the screenshot below.
Once you click on Post, you’ll be taken to a page with text boxes where you can add a blog post.
Step 2 — Add Content to the Post
The Add New Post page has a text box for a title and a text box for the body content.
The title of your blog post should be descriptive so that people know what your post is about. You will enter this title in the top text box.
The body content of your blog post goes in the larger text box. You may have already written out your blog post, in which case you can copy and paste your written blog post into the body text box. If you have not already, you can begin writing in this space, but it is recommended that you save your draft frequently so that you don’t lose any work.
You may notice that there is a Visual tab and a Text tab associated with the body text box. The Visual tab will allow you to use the body text box like a word processor, complete with different styles of text (that is, bold, italic, etc.). The Text tab will enable you to input HTML-formatted text, or to see what the text looks like in HTML format. You may edit your content from either tab.
In the image below, we highlighted the words “CUNY Humanities Alliance” in order to render that text in a bold face by clicking the “B” button on the Visual tab.
As you are working on your blog post, it is a good idea to save or preview the post throughout to ensure that you don’t lose your work and to have a sense of how your blog post will look within the context of your course site.
Step 3 — Save or Preview Post
In the Publish toolbar to the right of the text boxes, you’ll see two buttons in addition to the Publish button. These two buttons are Save Draft and Preview.
While you are working, you should save your blog post draft frequently to make sure that you don’t lose your work. You can do this by clicking on the Save Draft button. When you click on the Save Draft button, you will see a spinning wheel while the website is working and communicating with the server to save your blog post.
You will receive confirmation that the post draft was saved and therefore updated with your latest revision under the “Edit Post” heading.
Your blog post draft is now saved but is not yet published or available publicly on the site.
In order to get an idea of what your blog post will look like within the context of your course’s website, you can press the Preview button. When you click on this button, a new browser window or tab will open with a preview of what your post will look like once you publish it.
The Preview button will not save your draft or publish your post, so make sure that you are saving your draft as you go along and publish it when you are ready for others to view it.
Step 4 — Add Tags
Though it is not a requirement, it is a good practice to add tags to your blog posts in order to help others in your class find the information that they need. Tags help to sort posts by providing helpful keywords. If your course is open to others in the CUNY Humanities Alliance community, or to the general public, tags can help search engines classify the posts and make sure that people who want to read the post are able to find it.
The Tags toolbar is to the right of the text boxes.
You can add tags individually by typing a word such as “Reflection” and click the Add button or ENTER on your keyboard, or you can include a few words separated by commas and then choosing Add: “Reflection,Essay,New York City”.
With those tags added, you’ll receive confirmation that you have successfully tagged your post with those keywords.
If your site uses tags frequently, you can click on the “Choose from the most used tags” link to show what others are using and to include those as tags to your post if they are appropriate.
Step 5 — Add Featured Image
Including a Featured Image makes your blog post more visually effective. Readers will be able to get a quick sense of what your post is about based on the image, and the site will look more aesthetically pleasing and approachable.
To add a featured image, navigate to the Featured Image toolbar.
Click on the “Set featured image” link.
You will be taken to a page where you can upload an image.
Drag in your image file or select it from navigating your computer’s file system.
The image will then be uploaded into your course site’s Media Library. Once it is uploaded you will see a checkmark that the upload is complete.
From here, it is a good idea to add “Alt Text” or Alternative Text so that users with screen readers are able to understand what the image is. This provides great accessibility.
When you are done adding Alt Text, click on the Set featured image button in order to include this Featured Image as part of your post.
Once you have done so, you’ll see that your featured image is included in the side Featured Image toolbar.
If you decide you want to change the image, you can click the image to edit it, update it by selecting an alternate image, or you can click the “Remove featured image” to delete the featured image entirely.
Step 6 — Publish Post
When you are satisfied with your blog post, you can click on the Publish button on the top right side of the Edit Post page.
If you do not modify the settings, the post will be visibly publicly to anyone with access to the course site, and will also be published immediately.
You’ll receive confirmation that the post is published both above the post title and in the Publish toolbar on the right.
If you would like to make changes, you can do so now and click the Update button. This will make all revisions available publicly immediately.
You can now view your post by clicking View Post on the top menu bar, or the URL in the Permalink.
Congratulations! You have published your first blog post on your course site!
