I’ve added a new page under the “About Me” section over there on the right called “About this Blog“. This page describes sort of the nitty gritty details of how the blog works, and how you can navigate around. This page will stay around for informational purposes, but I will display the text below. Let me know if I’ve missed anything, or if there are any questions you’ve had that I left unanswered. Even if you’ve been reading the blog for a while, there might be some tips and tricks you didn’t know about!

Thanks,

The Management

The Basics:

This blog is published 5 days a week, Monday through Friday, around 7 p.m. Central time. Regular features include “Quote Monday“, which is a list of funny things the kids have said, usually collected during the previous weekend.

Older posts can be retrieved from the archives by using the calendar in the right hand column, or the “Older Posts” drop-down below it to select a month and a year.

To search the blog, enter text into the box in the upper right hand corner and press “Search Results”.

General purpose links, such as links to other blogs I read, can be found at the top of the right hand column, under the search box.

To join in the discussion, see the Recent Comments section on the right. This will show you who has commented recently and which post they commented on. Click on the hyperlink next to their name to see their comment.

Advanced Navigation:

Categories:

Posts fall into a few categories, such as “From the Mouths of Babes” or “My So Called Life“. All posts in a category are related in some way. For example, the Quote Monday posts are all under “From the Mouths of Babes“, and posts about my day-to-day life are located under “My So Called Life“. To see all the posts in a particular category, scroll down until you see the “Categories” drop-down in the right hand column. Selecting a category from the drop-down list will display all of the posts in that category (don’t forget to hit “Older Entries” at the bottom of the page to see more posts).

Tags:

In addition to being categorized, each post is also tagged. Tags are sort of short descriptions of what type of things you might find in a post. For example, a post about eating bacon while holed up during the zombie apocalypse might be tagged “bacon“, “zombies” and “zombie apocalypse”.

These tags are used by search engines, but they are more than just informational. If a tag sounds interesting to you, you can see all posts I’ve made that have been tagged the same. There are a few different ways to do this.

One way to sort by tags is to scroll down until you see the “Tags” section in the right hand column. This is called a “tag cloud”, in which my most commonly used tags show up. The larger the font, the more often the tag has been used. Clicking on a tag will bring up all the posts with that tag attached to them. For example, the tag “baby” has been used a lot, and is quite large. Clicking on that link will bring up all the posts I’ve written and tagged “baby“.

Another way is to click on the tags in the header of a post. So if you are reading a post about a topic, and you want to know what else I had to say on that topic, look for a sentence like, “Posted in [Category] with tags [Tags]“. For example, you might see something like, “This entry was posted on August 24, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Evie Update with tags bacon, blog, parenting, pirates.” You can see that both the categories and the tags are hyperlinks, which you can click on to find other posts.

NOTE that clicking on these links doesn’t do what you think it should do!! These links will show you all posts on WORDPRESS.COM that have this tag, not only on my blog. If you look in the url field of your browser, you will see something like http://en.wordpress.com/tag/pirates/. To search only on my blog, change the url to something like https://erith1.wordpress.com/tag/pirates/. I don’t like that the provided links go to all of wordpress, but I don’t know how to fix it, so we have to live with it. Sorry!

This does, however, bring up a third way for you to search for tags on my blog: just type “https://erith1.wordpress.com/tag/” into the address bar, followed by a word. If I have any posts tagged with that word, they will show up.

RSS Feed:

This blog publishes two RSS feeds, one for posts, and one for comments. If you use an RSS reader (I use Google Reader), you can add these urls to follow the posts or comments (or both). The advantage of this is that you will see every new post or comment as they go up, without having to check back to blog homepage. This is especially useful for the comments, because people sometimes post comments on old posts.