Managing your blog

An example link to a logged in user's profile page.If you're logged into the website, you'll see your account name in the top right of any page on the website. If you click upon this link you'll be taken to your “profile” page.

A profile is a view of your account on the website. While currently they're a little basic, over time they're likely to evolve into something more interesting, but they do have a number of useful features at the moment:

  • You can update your account details through the “Edit” tab e.g. to change your password or update your email address.
  • Every registered member of the site has a “Contact” tab on their profile. Through this form other registered members can send you an email. It's protected by a good anti spam system and thus rather than publishing your email address and risk it getting harvested by a spam bot, you may find it useful to direct people to your contact tab should they wish to get in touch privately rather than leaving a comment upon your blog.

  • An example My content page

    The My Content tab is perhaps the most useful, through it you can manage and keep an eye on comments to your posts. It allows you to find blog posts you've previously saved in the Draft state and edit them to select the Published state once you wish for them to go live. On the My Content tab you'll find a list of every piece of content you've created: it's name, the number of times it's been viewed, the number of comments (and new comments), the “state” of the post, whether it's published yet or not and a link to edit it.

A quick explanation of a blog's “states”

Throughout it's lifetime a particular blog post can exist in one of the following stages:

  • Creation: You've just clicked upon the “Write a blog post” link and are in the process of typing up your post prior to saving it.
  • Draft: A work in progress, a post that you've saved on the website but is not yet published and visible.
  • Published: A blog post that has been published on the website.
  • Syndicated: A blog post that is visible/posted to other websites e.g. a link to it posted to Facebook, to Twitter etc.
  • Review: A blog post that is under editorial review.

As a contributor to the website you can toggle your posts between Draft and Published. When you Published blog on the site an email is sent off to all the staff here at EIL, we'll check that it's OK and then set it to the Syndicated.

The reason for this is so that we can have a very light editorial control over the things that people post, not censorship over anything critical but just in case that something really unsuitable is posted (say you forgot to logout of your account after visiting an internet cafe and someone starts playing around). We want to read your stories, the highs and lows, the challenges you face and overcome. If you encounter a problem we'd certainly like to be the first to know about it, but only so that we can fix things right away.