MamaBlogga

I think most of us have met Flat Stanley at least once—a far off niece, nephew or cousin gets an assignment in school and they send you a paper doll named Stanley. (In case you don’t know, you show Flat Stanley around and take pictures of local attractions with our man Stan and send them back to the sender.)

That’s a little like what Flat Daddy is about—the Flat Daddy project helps military families maintain unity even while their father (or mother, I’m sure!) is deployed. A life-size standup photograph of their loved one helps families to remember their dad and husband (like you could ever forget, but for little kids, it helps), and helps to make them an active part of their lives.

Here’s one family’s story about their Flat Daddy, as shared with their local news, which explains it so much better than I can:

(Okay, I’m crying just thinking about this.)

Elaine Dumler, the “Flat Daddy Lady,” is working to provide families with free Flat Daddies. You can help support our military families with donations of any size.

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Author (and friend) Annette Lyon brought the Flat Daddy project to my attention. She learned about this project while writing her latest book, Band of Sisters, about five military wives, and I’m happy to help her spread the word (and celebrate her book).

In fact, Annette’s book launch for Band of Sisters is tonight. Annette Lyon, Sarah M. Eden (author of Courting Miss Lancaster), and Julie Coulter Bellon (author of Dangerous Connections) are all celebrating a book launch at the Orem Deseret Book (by University Mall) from 6-8PM.

If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by for tons of fun and door prizes!

We’re continuing our series on getting started with blogging, bouncing back to WordPress this week to look at the basics of posting and creating pages.

Previously, we looked at how to create your first post—but there’s a lot of information and options on the post page that we didn’t cover. To get to the edit post or add new post page, you can use your dashboard or the gray bar at the top of your screen when you’re logged in to WordPress. The Posts menu is on the left-hand side:

The Edit option takes you to a list of your posts (click to enlarge):

Here, the posts you’ve saved as drafts, published or scheduled on your blog are listed in chronological order. You can click on a post title to edit it individually. When you hover your cursor over the title of the post, you get additional options below the title: Edit (which does the same thing as clicking on the post title), Quick Edit (which lets you change things like tags, categories, title, and date right in the Edit Posts page), Trash (which moves the post to your trash, where you can salvage it later if you want), or View (to see what it would or does look like on your blog).

On the same line as each post title, you can also click on the author name to only show posts by a certain author, or the category name to narrow your view to posts in that category. Each post’s viewing stats and comments are also accessible from here.

You can also edit multiple posts from this screen. Check the boxes next to the posts you want to edit and use the drop down menu labeled Bulk Actions to edit or delete multiple posts. This is waht it looks like when you choose to edit multiple posts (again, click to enlarge):

This way, you can change multiple posts into different categories, add tags to multiple posts and change whether they can have comments or are even published—many of the same things you can do for a single post in Quick Edit.

The next option on the Posts menu is Add New. (You can also add a new post by clicking on the New Post button on the top gray menu bar.) We looked at how to create and publish a post last time; this time we’ll look at the rest of the post options on this page.

Below the post text box, there are three boxes for more information: Excerpt, Send Trackbacks, and Discussion. For the most part, these are pretty self-explanatory—especially since they include an explanation .

To the right of the post box, there are three more boxes with options: Publish, Post Tags and Categories:

The Publish box has the Save Draft, Preview and Publish buttons. (Once you’ve published a post, these buttons are replaced with a Preview Changes button up top and an Update button on the bottom).

This box also has more options: You can click Edit by Draft to change the status from Draft to Pending Review (for drafts you’ve completed but aren’t ready to schedule). Once you’ve published, Published is added to this option list. Clicking Edit next to Visibility allows you to set a post as public, private or password-protected (by a password you set). Also under this option, you can set a post to always remain on the front page of your blog, such as a short post describing your blog or perhaps inviting visitors to introduce themselves.

The Post Tags box is used to add tags to a post. These are usually listed on your post and can let your users see all your posts on a particular, narrow topic. Tags are generally more specific than categories (the next box down): if you blog about knitting, for example, you might have a category for all your Projects, but tags for Finished Objects, Sweaters, Cardigans, etc. When adding tags, be sure to hit the Add button (or the Enter/Return key) AND save the post/draft to save them. (You can remove a tag by clicking the x next to it.)

The Categories box lets you categorize your posts by the broader topics of your blog. You can also add a new category from right inside this box—just click +Add New Category and you’ll get a text box to name your new category.

Note that the Add New Post page can be customized: you can drag and drop all six of these boxes to rearrange the page however you’d like.

Also on the Posts menu are pages to manage all your tags and categories. The Manage Tags page (click to enlarge):

From here, you can add new tags, as well as edit the descriptions of existing tags. Once you’ve published posts with tags, your most used tags appear under Popular Tags. Also, an alphabetical list of the tags, their descriptions and the number of posts using those tags will appear to the right. As with posts, you can use the check boxes to select multiple tags to delete, or you can edit individual tags (such as to add a description) by clicking on the tag’s name. Clicking on the number of posts using them gives you a list of posts (on the Edit Posts page) using that tag.

The Categories page is very similar (click to enlarge):

The most notable difference here is that “categories, unlike tags, can have a hierarchy.” Tags are all one level, but Categories can be “parents” or “children”—you can have one category broken up into multiple subcategories. With our knitting blog example, maybe under the Projects category, you have three subcategories: Cardigans, Pullovers and Socks.

(Why use subcategories instead of tags? If a topic is really central to the purpose of your blog and something you’ll be posting about frequently, but falls under the purview of a broader subject of your blog, a subcategory might be the perfect fit—but only you can decide what should be a tag and what should be a category.)

In addition to Posts, you can also have Pages on your blog. Posts are the temporal stuff—the day-to-day news updates, the regular content on your blog. Pages are for important information not tied to time, like your About or Contact pages. The Pages menu is further down on the left-hand side of WordPress:

The two options, Edit and Add New, lead to pages almost identical to the Edit and Add New Posts pages.

The biggest difference in creating pages is that, like categories, you can have subordinate pages—for example, your About page might have child pages on your Biography, your Portfolio, etc. This is set in the Attributes box below the Publish box on the Edit or Add New Page page:

You can also use a custom template (if you dare) for certain pages—a different layout for a particular page, for example. The page Order determines what order your pages are displayed on your menu bar on your blog. If it’s not set, the pages are listed by date published.

Whew! Everything there is to know about the Posts and Pages menus on WordPress!

Every time I get Hayden a banana, Rebecca claps her hands. “Meeee? Meeee?” she asks in her nasal little voice, jabbing a finger in her chest.

Rebecca doesn’t like bananas. (I started keeping a list of the foods she does like; there are about a dozen.) And yet every time I start peeling one, she wants it.

“You don’t like bananas,” I tell her.

“Meeee? Meeee?”

“You won’t like it.”

She grins and signs please. (She’s even recently begun trying to say it, usually “pee” or “tee.”)

I know she doesn’t like bananas. Usually, it’s only been a day or two since the last time we went through this routine, so it’s not like she suddenly developed a taste for them. But still, I worry—what if maybe she would like bananas? What if my saying “You don’t like these” is just reinforcing her bias, and she would really like them if I just let her give them a chance?

So just in case, I usually cut off the very tip or just offer it to her. She’ll put her lips on it—no teeth or tongue anywhere near the questionable fruit—and then vehemently shake her head. “‘Ohhh, ‘ohhhh.” (How she says “no.”)

And tomorrow, she’ll probably want it again. I’ll probably give it to her again. Just in case.

Of course, Rebecca may be a little too young to learn that if you keep doing what you’re doing, you keep getting what you’re getting. Then again, maybe I am, too. Sometimes it seems like although I don’t like the way some things are in my life, I don’t want to make the effort to change them. I have just enough energy to whine about them .

What crazy things do your kids ask for? What do you (or your kids) keep trying even though you know you don’t like it?

Photo by eko

So last week, I received a spiritual impression that I need to try to be more engaged with my children. I knew it was the truth—I’d let myself get so caught up in what I want to do, and what I want to accomplish. When I get overwhelmed with my children—or my goals—I tend to retreat (usually into the computer).

Which doesn’t help anything.

After a really rough start to the week, I think I’m finally starting to do better. Yeah, the television was still on a lot of the morning, but this time I was sitting next to them or holding them and interacting with them. We finally turned off the television and went to look for the barking dog (out the window). And I didn’t touch the computer once from the time we came home from preschool to the time the kids went down for quiet time.

No, it hasn’t been a perfect day—there has still been some yelling and whining and man, how do you get them to stop hitting one another?!, but it’s still been the best day of the week.

About time I took my own advice .

How do you make an effort to be “engaged” with your children?

While this post is intended for beginners, there may be something for all of us here. Did you know that Blogger now has “Pages”? This is a very cool, very important step for Blogger as a “full-featured” blogging platform. You don’t have to cobble together a menu bar or touch HTML or flood your feed as you create “About Me” and “Contact” pages. (Check out the fourth picture and description for more details.)

All right, so we’ve created a blog with Blogger and even made our first post. Now we’re ready to learn a little more about posting. When you log in to Blogger and go to your blog, click on the Posting tab. You’ll see you have four sub-options.

The first, rather obviously, creates a New Post. We already went over how to create a post, so today we’ll look at the Post Options below the post text box. Click on the triangle to open the Post Options:

Here, you can switch off comments on a case-by-case basis. (In a few weeks, we’ll find how to turn off all comments automatically.) Unless you want to code your posts in HTML, keep the Enter HTML Line Breaks set to Press “Enter for Line Breaks. And if you’re not entering any HTML (for example, the code for others to copy and paste to use a badge), don’t worry about the Compose Settings.

The Post Date and Time has two options: Automatic, meaning it sets the date and time of the post to whenever you hit Publish, or Scheduled, meaning you get to pick the date and time displayed on the post. You can pick a time in the past to post-date a post, or you can pick a date or time to schedule a post to go live in the future. (When you click the button by Scheduled, a box pops up for you to enter the date and time you want.)

Finally, note here the Labels. You can use these to assign your posts to categories, and organize them for you and your visitors. You can have many, many Labels on a post, using them as specific “tags” so you can keep track of all the topics you mention, or you can stick to 5-10 or so Labels total, and use them as broad categories to organize your blog into general topics.

The next option under the Posting Tab is the Edit Posts option. This lists all your posts and drafts—and this is where to go to finish working on a draft post.

You can select some or all of your posts to add labels (with the drop down menu at left). You can also filter the posts you see by when they are or will be published: drafts aren’t scheduled to be published, Scheduled posts have been assigned a date and time and “published,” but aren’t visible on the blog yet, and Imported posts came from another blog (we’ll look at how to do that another week).

On the line with the post, you can see the Title and the date or time (if recent enough) it was either published or last edited. To the left of the title is a little triangle—you can click on the triangle to see the text of the post without leaving this page. If a post has been published, you have the option to View just left of that. And left of that, you click Edit to finish or fix a post.

At the top, you can search in your posts or create a new post. At the bottom, you can publish or delete any of the posts you’ve selected with the check boxes on their lines.

The next option under the Posting Tab is the Edit Pages option. Pages are not like posts. Posts are little bits of time. They have dates and times attached to them. They’re your weekly/daily/whateverly updates. Pages are for the information that’s almost always going to stay the same on your blog: who you are, how to contact you, etc. My pages are displayed in a line underneath my header. (Home, Blog Mentoring, About, Contact, etc.)

You can have the same layout easily with Blogger. (This used to be a lot of work!) Click on Edit Pages to view the page menu. Here, you have the option to create a new page. Below that, any existing pages are displayed. Click on New Page to create a new page.

The Create a New Page page looks just like the create a new post page. Enter your title and text here, and click Publish Page to make it live.

If this is your first Page, Blogger will ask you where you’d like the list of your pages to be displayed on your blog. I highly recommend the Blog tabs option.

When you visit your blog, you can see the Pages listed below the header:

The last option under the Posting tab is Comment Moderation. All this has is a link to the Settings page for Comment Moderation:

And we’ll talk about that with other settings!

There you go—now you can save drafts, create new posts and create pages for your Blogger blog.

Anything need to be clearer?

Last week, I went to a great talk on parenting, with a lot of great advice on discipline and behavior. But then I had to come back to my home and implement it. And boy, am I not perfect. Here it is, just under a week later, and we’re back to the screamfest that so often seems to be our life.

I feel like we’re doing something wrong—beyond the screaming.

But for some things (getting your kids to clean up and stop tantruming and stop tantruming about cleaning up), it feels like there just is no right way.

This just makes me happy.

When do you feel like “ur doin it wrong”?

Picture from LOLcat.com