Blogging with Windows Live Writer. 2. Writing your post.

The Home Ribbon.

Now we’ll take a look at setting out your posts as you want them to look. Above the Editing screen, you’ll no doubt have noticed the Ribbon interface used in Writer. When you open Writer, the HOME ribbon is the one visible to you by default. This ribbon consists of the following areas, Clipboard (which I never really use personally, so for now we’ll ignore it) Publish (where you are given the choice of publishing your blog once completed, either as a viewable post or as a draft post) Font where you can choose which font you would like to use for this post and its size etc, Paragraph which includes bulleted, numbered lists and quotes. This is followed by HTML Styles, and once you set your cursor into the main writing area, the Paragraph choice will be highlighted by default, followed by various headings to choose from, Insert, where are given the choice of inserting either a Hyperlink, Picture or Video, and finally Editing where you can check your spelling, find a word and select all of your post.  Let’s work our way through them shall we?

1. Place your cursor in the post Title area and fill in your Post Title. You can’t choose different fonts or sizes for the post title in Writer, this is dictated by whichever theme you are using.

2. Once you have completed your post title, click return to move down to the writing area. Now the Paragraph icon in the HTML styles will be highlighted. If you don’t wish to add a header to your paragraph, you now need to choose your font and size that you wish to use, and also its colour if you wish to change it from the default one’s used in your blogs theme. To change the font, click on the small arrow next to the font box. A drop down list will appear that you can scroll down. Choose your font from the list.

For this how-to, I’ll choose Segoe UI. Note that all fonts that are available on your computer, including any that you have downloaded, will also be available to use in Writer including those used in Word.

3. When you have chosen your font, click on the size box on the right of the font box to select the size of your font. In my case I could go right up to 36 size

which is quite large! The small icon on the right of the

size box will clear all formatting, returning you to clear text, so use with caution!

4. Below the font box are other choices for your text. You can make it bold italic underline it if you wish to make it stand out place a strike through it as if you had crossed it out do a _subscript or ^superscript and also highlight some of your text including choosing the colour. In order to do that, you will need to highlight that particular text by selecting it all via your left mouse button and holding it down until all of your chosen text is highlighted.

5. Finally you can choose the overall colour of your written text, and this is best chosen right at the beginning at the same time as you choose your font and size. If you click on the underlined A, a drop down box will appear with the colours for you to choose from. If you are not happy with the default choice of colours available, click on More Colours followed by Define Custom Colours to choose your own. See screen grab above.

• In the Paragraph area of the ribbon, you can add a bulleted or numbered list. by simply clicking on each.
• Now whenever you begin a new line, a bullet or a number will automatically be added to your text.
• To stop the bulleting or numbering, simply deselect it.

6.

You can also make selected text into a block quote like so by selecting the ‘quote’ icon to the right of the bullet and numbering icons. Once you have completed your block quote, just deselect it.

7. Normally when writing you want your paragraph to always be left aligned or placed against the left side. However, you might want to include a paragraph or part of your writing that is centred on the page or even placed up to the right hand side.

To centre your text simply select the centre icon by clicking on it. It will be highlighted and any text place in your post from then on will begin in the centre of your post and move outwards, but will remain central until you deselect the Centre icon. Try it out to see exactly how this works and how it looks.

You can also do the same with the Align Text to the right.

Finally you can Justify all of your text, or just a paragraph. Justify makes the words in a paragraph ‘spread out’ so that they all line up at both the right hand side of your post and also the left hand side as well. This is done by spacing each word and some people like it better because it looks neater as it doesn’t end with different length lines. As you can see by this paragraph. Of course, if you have never done any word processing, you won’t be familiar with any of this!

8. Next let’s choose a header. Normally I never have the need to place any headers in my blog posts, but if you are writing a more ‘professional’ looking post, you might want to use headers in order to talk about separate subjects or areas of your subject. To include a header, place your cursor at the beginning of a new line, and select one of the headers in the HTML styles area.

This is my Header.

As you can see, depending on the style of your blog theme, some of the headers include a dotted line underneath.  If you don’t want this, then choose one of the other headers that do not include the line.

This is Header 3.

As soon as you begin a new line after you have placed your header, Writer automatically selects the Paragraph formatting for you.

Next post, we’ll tackle inserting a Hyperlink, a Picture and also a Video into your post.

Technogran

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