Every so often, I’m reminded that many new readers aren’t familiar with how to find their way around a blog such as OneInJesus. The following will be painfully obvious to veteran readers, but will hopefully be of use to newbies.
Index. Over in the left column, there’s a caption called Pages. Underneath are links to five items. Those with a + sign to the left will expand when clicked on. Once expanded, each underlined link will take you to a page with the indicated information. Clicking on a – (minus) sign will collapse the list into a shorter list.
One of the links is called Index. There are gobs of links under that, one for each series posted here from the beginning of the blog. The links will ultimately take you to a listing of posts under each series caption.
Unfortunately, my series captions aren’t always as transparent as I mean for them to be, and I should probably take off a few weeks and better organize the Index. But with a little patience, it will take you to every single article on the blog.
Tabs. There are green tabs at the top of the page. These parallel the Pages/Index system on the left. Also, you can always click on the Home tab to get to the top of the most recent page of posts.
Search. In the upper right corner is a box labeled Search. It searches the articles I post but not the comments posted by me and others.
You can search the entire site, including comments, in Google using a query in this form: “site:oneinjesus.info Calvinism” — which would produce every reference to “Calvinism” in articles or comments.
Home. When you first go to , you are taken to the Home page. This page has the first paragraph or so of the most recent 10 posts. Each time I post a new article, the oldest of the 10 posts disappears to the Next Page.
Next Page. At the bottom of the page, there’s a linked called Next Page. It will take you to the 11th through 20th oldest posts. At the bottom of that page are a Previous Page and a Next Page link. Click on Previous Page and you return to the Home page. Click on the Next Page link, and you’ll go to a page with the 21st through 30th oldest posts. And you can follow the Next Page links hundreds of pages deep all the way back to the beginning of the blog!
Subscribe. In the upper righthand corner, just under Search, you’ll find a box labeled Subscribe. You can type in your email address to subscribe to new posts by email. Hundreds of readers read this way. Your email address won’t be provided to spammers.
RSS. In the upper left corner, there are two links, one for Entries RSS and the other for RSS Comments. People disagree about what “RSS” stands for, but it’s a standard means for blogs and other websites to send you content. Some say it means “Really Simple Syndication.”
Here’s what you do.
1. Go to http://www.google.com/reader/ and follow the instructions to set up Google Reader. It’s free.
There are other RSS readers, but Google Reader is likely the most popular one. Outlook also has an RSS reader built in, for example.
CNET offers this guide to Google Reader.
2. You can subscribe to any website with RSS content, including most newspapers, blogs, magazines, and such. I subscribe to several Christian websites, several Alabama sports blogs, my local paper, and a bunch of other stuff.
3. If you have an iPhone or other smartphone, you can download a free Google Reader application. Or you can set up a bookmark to http://www.google.com/m#reader (for most smartphones) or http://www.google.com/reader/i for an iPhone. I prefer bookmarking the page over the Google Reader application. Google Reader compresses many pages into a format more convenient for mobile phone reading.
When you’re done with the set up, you’ll receive a list of article captions from each RSS feed you subscribe to. It’ll update each time you open the Reader page. Just click on what you want to read.
You’ll notice that you can separately subscribe to comments and posts at OneInJesus. Some like both. Some just like the posts.
Other stuff. If you’ll explore the rest of the Home page, you’ll find links to Recent Comments, Recent Posts, and Daily Popular.
Recent Posts lists the most recent 15 posts, allowing you go back further in time without having to use the Next Page link at the bottom of the Home page.
Recent Comments list recently made comments, giving the author and the post. Unfortunately, the link takes you to the post and not the precise comment, but the most recent comments will be at the bottom of the article.
Daily Popular lets you know which posts are most read.
This is great. However, I've noticed that a lot of the articles that you've been posting the past few months haven't gone into the index under the proper category. Instead they are simply "uncategorized". So, when you click on the series link, only part of the series is there.
I appreciate the info. But i still have problems. when i click on the churches jobs etc it expands. when i click on the contact it takes me the the contact screen. when i click on the index it doesn't expand. The only way i have found to get to the info is to right click on it and open it. Is it something on my end that is amiss?
Slewis1967,
It works on my computer. You may want to check to be sure you have Java installed and enabled on your computer. http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en… gives instructions.
Booklover,
You're right but for a different reason. WordPress doesn't automatically Index these sites. It's done through the Pages feature and the entries are manual.
I don't use the Categories feature.
I have a friend who makes the manual entries but he's now in grad school while working a fulltime job. Sometimes he gets behind.
So if anyone wants to volunteer to help …