General

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The General Settings group relates to basic display and time grouping items shown on your blog. It contains the following items:

  • Blog Title: The display title of your blog.
  • Tagline: What your blog is about.
  • E-mail Address: The e-mail address where you want site generated e-mail to go to.
  • Membership: Toggle box which, when enabled, only allows registered, logged in users to comment
  • Timezone: The time zone that you are in. Note: This setting must be manually updated for Daylight Savings Time
  • Date Format: Determines the date format to show (such as December 18, 2008)
  • Time Format: Determines the time format to show (standard or military)
  • Week Starts On: Select the day your week starts on

Settings

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There are many different available Settings that can be configured in WordPress.  These settings can affect everything from what your blog site displays as a title, to how commentary is handled, to whether or not your site is visible to the public or not.

There are 10 different sub-categories within the Settings group:

  • Writing
  • Reading
  • Discussion
  • Media
  • Privacy
  • Permalinks
  • Delete Blog
  • Embedded Video
  • Blog Category
  • Subscribe to Comments

Read on to discover what these settings do.

Export a Blog

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To export a blog from WordPress, do the following:

  • Log into your existing WordPress blog as an Administrator.
  • Click on the Site Admin link.
  • From your Dashboard, click on Tools > Export and do the following:
    • Restrict Author: Choose either All Authors, or restrict an Author from being exported, if you wish.
    • Click the Download Export File button. A dialog box will appear.
    • Click the Save File option.
    • Click the OK button.
  • Your WordPress blog will save itself as an xml file.

Note: These instructions are for WordPress.  If you are trying to export an existing blog that uses a different blogging application, the process is probably quite similar.  Please see any applicable help instructions for non-WordPress blogs.

Import a Blog

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WordPress allows you to import your existing blog site into the blogs.oregonstate.edu environment.

Note: To import a blog, you will need to have a valid blog export file.  For instructions on how to export a WordPress blog, please visit the Export post at: .

To import your blog file into blogs.oregonstate.edu, do the following:

  • Log into blogs.oregonstate.edu.
  • Click on the Site Admin link.
  • From within your Dashboard, click on Tools > Import and do the following:
    • Choose the blog system to import from – there are several, we’ll use WordPress for our example.
    • The Import WordPress screen appears.
    • Click the Browse button.
      • The File Upload dialog box appears. Locate your WordPress file from your computer and select it.
      • Click the Open button – your file name will autofill in the necessary field.
      • Click the Upload File and Import button.
    • The Import WordPress screen opens.
      • If you have material on your new site already, you can map authors from your old site to your new one with the Map Authors tool. Otherwise, leave it blank.
      • If your old site contains any file attachments that you would like to include, click the Download and Import File Attachments option.
      • Click the Submit button
    • A page of execution steps will appear. If there are no errors in the upload, the words “All Done. Have Fun” will appear at the bottom of the screen.  Clicking on the Have Fun hyperlink will take you to the Site View of your blog.

Things to Consider

When importing an old blogsite to blogs.oregonstate.edu, there are a few things to consider:

Upload File Size Considerations

There is a 10 MB file upload size constraint that is in place.  If the size of your blog import file exceeds 10MB, please contact CWS.

Total File Size Considerations

The total allowed blog size for blogs.oregonstate.edu is 50MB.  If your blog is larger than this, please contact CWS.

Embedded Media

Embedded media can be anything from a picture, to an audio file, or a video file. There are two different ways to embed media. You can either upload a file, such as a picture, up into the WordPress file manager, or you can embed a third party item, such as a YouTube video.

There aren’t any concerns with embedded third-party media from sites such as Flickr or YouTube. There may be issues, though, with embedded media that is linked to a directory in your old site.

After the import, your links should still work, but they will be pointing to a file that is located on your old site’s server. This may not pose an issue, but if (for some reason) the files were removed, the links to your media would break.

There are a few courses of action you could take:

  • If your media is located at a trusted, reliable source that won’t remove your files you might be all right with leaving your embeds just the way they are.
  • You can re-upload all of your media to your new blogsite and re-set all of the links. For small blogsites, this might not be a problem. For bigger sites with a large quantity of embeds, this might not be a practical solution.