Basic directions
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Academic Blogs wiki
The Academic Blogs portal is run using wiki software. Wikis are web pages which are easily modifiable, but which preserve histories of changes, so that unhelpful edits can easily be reverted. To edit any page (except the few which are protected) on this website, click the "edit" button at the top of that page. To edit a specific section of a page which is divided into sections, click on the edit button above that section.
Editing a wiki
Once you click on the edit button, you will be confronted with a box full of modifiable text. You can then edit the text, and when you are finished, click the 'Show preview' button at the bottom of the screen. If the preview looks OK, you can then click the 'save' button. After a couple of seconds (if the server is slow), you will be returned to the page - with your edits included.
Formatting codes
Mediawiki - the software platform underlying this site - has various codes allowing you to format text in particular ways. You can enter these codes in either of two ways. First, when you are in the editing screen, you can highlight the text that you want to format, and click on whichever of the buttons at the top of the edit box. For example, to bold text, you would select the text that you want to bold, and then hit the bolded 'B' button (the one on the far left). You can similarly italicize text, add hyperlinks to internal wikipages or external web pages, insert headlines and so on. Alternatively, you can simply enter in the formatting codes manually around the text that you want to format. A few useful codes.
'''text''' bolds the relevant text.
''text'' italicizes the relevant text.
[[Wiki Page]] creates a link to an internal wikipage on this site. If the wikipage that you are trying to link to doesn't exist, it creates a blank page.
[http://www.webaddress.com Web address] makes "Web address" into an external hyperlink to the website wwww.webaddress.com. For example, [http://www.google.com Google] creates a link like this - Google.
* at the beginning of a new line creates a bullet.
Formatting guidelines
New links to blogs should be inserted in alphabetical order by blog title, except where the blog's title consists solely of the blogger's name. In this case it should be listed alphabetically by the surname rather than the forename of the blogger. Where blog lists grow too unwieldy feel free to subdivide alphabetically (i.e A-C, D-F etc). In general, try to preserve the formatting rules in existing pages, and not to use idiosyncratic formats. If you want to create new forms of content (i.e. something that isn't simply adding a blog to the existing list) you should create a link to a new page under "Internal Resources." If you want to create an external link to an interesting resource elsewhere on the WWW, put the link under "External resources."
