SharePoint - Blog Sites

A blog is a Web site that enables you or your organization to quickly share ideas and information. Blogs contain posts that are dated and listed in reverse chronological order. People can comment on your posts, as well as provide links to interesting sites, photos, and related blogs.

Blogs posts can be created quickly, and they often have an informal tone or provide a unique perspective. Although blogs are frequently used for commentary on the Internet, they can be used in several ways in a corporate environment. For example, in one of companies I worked, maintenance employees were using a SharePoint blog to document their findings during the site visit and their supervisor to respond by posting comments to their posts.

A SharePoint blog is a site that contains lists and libraries, such as a list of blog posts, a list of other blogs, and a library for photos. Once you create a blog, you can set up categories, and then customize the blog settings.

To create or customize a blog, you must have permission to create a site. When you create a blog, you need to decide whether you want the blog to inherit permissions from the parent site or set up unique permissions manually. In most cases, you should set up unique permissions for the blog to ensure that you can manage its site settings, lists, and libraries independently of its parent site. For example, you might want to grant less restrictive permissions on your blog than on the parent site, such as enabling all authenticated users on your intranet to read and comment on the blog.

You can also create and customize a blog by using Microsoft SharePoint Designer.

Before you start adding content to your blog, you will want to make sure that your site, lists, and libraries are set up the way that you want. For example, you may want to edit the description of a list to help your readers understand its purpose, change permissions for the blog or the Posts list, or track versions of your blog posts so that you can restore a previous version of a post if necessary.

Once created, you may want to customize settings for your blog, or for its lists and libraries. Once you have customized the settings for your blog, you can set up categories to help you organize your posts. Categories are especially helpful if you create blog posts about different subjects or for different purposes, such as current events, brainstorming for a special project, or a technology or hobby. When posts are organized by categories, people can more easily find the posts that fit their interests by clicking the appropriate category in the Categories list. If you don't want to use categories, you can choose None for the category when you create a post.

You can change the image and description that appear under "About this blog" by modifying the web part that contains this information.

To create a blog, follow these steps:

1.Click Site Actions, and then click New Site.

2.In the Create dialog box, click the Blog site template.

3.In the Title box, type a name for your blog site. The title appears in the navigation for every page in the site, such as the top link bar.

4.In the URL name box, type the last part of the Web address that you want to use for your blog site.

To create a blog according to the default settings, including the same permissions as the parent site, click Create.

To customize some of the site settings, such as set unique permissions or change whether the site appears in the Quick Launch or the top link bar, select More Options.

To create, edit or delete categories, follow these steps:

1.Click All Site Content.

2.Under Lists, click Categories.

The Categories list appears. If you haven't set up categories on the blog before, the list contains category placeholders, such as Category 1 and Category 2. Here you can create new categories, edit current categories, i.e. give them meaningful names or delete categories.

Have fun with your blog!