Twins Daily Primer: The Blogs

First, you’ll want to create your blog if you haven’t done so already. Just hop over to the blog section of the site and click the “Create a Blog” button. For those of you with blogs, you’ll see an “Add Entry” button in its place.

One additional feature of the new software is that you can now have multiple blogs on Twins Daily. Why would you want to do this? I have no idea; just letting you know the option exists.

Anyway, back to you new bloggers. Veteran bloggers, you can skip to the next paragraph. Once you’ve clicked “Create a Blog”, you will be prompted to name your blog and add a description and other related information. It’s all self-explanatory, just follow through the instructions and save your new blog. To create a new blog post, click “Add Entry” from the blog main page.

Okay, so now everybody has a blog and has clicked “Add Entry.” Now we’re into the meat and potatoes of the new blog system: entering a blog. I’m going to skip over a few of the more self-explanatory steps (poll creation, publish/draft, preview, etc) and focus on some of the things that might confuse a new user. As you can see below, I have conveniently numbered the points for you.

1. Tags: you can tag “like content” in the new Twins Daily. The system will automatically generate links to like content in other blogs that are similarly tagged. A useful feature that helps users find related content and drive more traffic to your personal blog. For consistency and accuracy, it's best to list each tag as "firstname lastname" with no punctuation (and without the quotes). To add multiple tags, hit the comma key and that phrase will be added as a tag.

2. Entry image: this is the image that will appear at the top left of your blog and in the blog main page next to your post title. You can leave this blank but the more high-quality images you use, the more likely a person is to click into your post and read it.

3. Entry album: this is part of our new Twins Daily gallery. You can create an album of images and include the entire album in a blog post. This drop-down menu is how you add an album.

4. My Media: again, a gallery option but instead of posting albums, this can be used for single images. Do you have an image you want to re-use multiple times in blog or forum posts? Add it to your gallery and re-use the image multiple times with the My Media button.

Video (not shown): mea culpa, I forgot to add this option to the image. To the left of My Media, you can see a green/blue square icon. If you want to add video from YouTube, MLB.com, or Vimeo, click this icon and selected Media from the drop-down list. Paste your YouTube or MLB.com URL into the Media URL field and click okay. The video will automatically insert into your post.

5. Paste Rich Content from your Blog: this is a brand-new feature. For security and technical reasons, allowing users to directly past images, links, and HTML markup into a post window is a bad idea. But you don’t want to re-link all your content and re-add images when pasting from your own blog. That’s lame. Click this text and paste your blog content into the generated window. Click okay. The system strips out all bad mark-up language (fonts, colors, etc.) and keeps your links, text effects (bold, italics, etc), and images. Super-handy.

6. Attach Files: obviously, being allowed just one image for your blog entry isn’t enough for long and/or complex entries. Need to add more images? Place your cursor where you want the image to appear, upload a new image using Attach Files, and then click Add to Article. The image will generate where you placed the cursor in the editing window.

After you’re done editing your post, click either Save Draft or Publish and your entry will be saved. Publish the entry to allow other users to read the blog entry.

Those are the blog basics. If you have questions or tips/tricks I missed in this article, be sure to post in the comments section!