How do I create a Blog through smugmug?

sgtbilko

hello! I am really new to smugmug and do not have a great understanding of how to build a website. I have manged to make most of my site but now I am trying to build a blog through my smugmug site (rather than link to wordpress etc).

I know this is possible, I am just struggling a bit with how to set up my folders / pages etc so that they all sit nicely on the Blog page allowing the viewer to scroll down and can choose which post to read.

I have got as far as setting up a page which the navigation bar links to and which also has embedded a particular gallery. What I can't figure out is how to link the navigation bar to a folder rather than a page. My logic being, if it links to a folder, then this will expand and provide the viewer access to various blog pages within (as you would expect from a blog!)

I hope this makes sense! If so, can anyone advise please?

Many thanks in advance!
sgtbilko

Allen

Have to tried to create a folder at the top level and in that folder put all your blog pages/galleries?

Ann McRae

Have you seen this article?
We'd suggest using a Folder to hold your pages, one page per article on your blog. You can customize the folder to display the pages within it, or you can take that further and add a page content block per article so that they display in an order that you can control. We've done something similar here, for example. That is a page that holds several page content blocks, in a particular order for display purposes. Those individual articles are pages that are within other folders on that site.

Hope that helps.

ann

sgtbilko wrote: »

hello! I am really new to smugmug and do not have a great understanding of how to build a website. I have manged to make most of my site but now I am trying to build a blog through my smugmug site (rather than link to wordpress etc).

I know this is possible, I am just struggling a bit with how to set up my folders / pages etc so that they all sit nicely on the Blog page allowing the viewer to scroll down and can choose which post to read.

I have got as far as setting up a page which the navigation bar links to and which also has embedded a particular gallery. What I can't figure out is how to link the navigation bar to a folder rather than a page. My logic being, if it links to a folder, then this will expand and provide the viewer access to various blog pages within (as you would expect from a blog!)

I hope this makes sense! If so, can anyone advise please?

Many thanks in advance!
sgtbilko

tomoscott

Ann McRae wrote: »

Have you seen this article?
We'd suggest using a Folder to hold your pages, one page per article on your blog. You can customize the folder to display the pages within it, or you can take that further and add a page content block per article so that they display in an order that you can control. We've done something similar here, for example. That is a page that holds several page content blocks, in a particular order for display purposes. Those individual articles are pages that are within other folders on that site.

Hope that helps.

ann

Ann, I have a blog on my SmugMug site, but it really is a hassle to make it function like a regular blog. Can you tell me if there are any plans to incorprate true blogging functions into SM? I came over here from Shopify, and this is one thing I really miss. Fine Art America offers integrated blogging as well.

markderry

Check out this post for instructions on how to hook a blog up with any blog service that has a RSS feed. http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=245283

Here is a working example on my own site: http://www.markderry.com/Pages/Blog/n-xDhFP

Ann McRae

tomoscott wrote: »

Ann, I have a blog on my SmugMug site, but it really is a hassle to make it function like a regular blog. Can you tell me if there are any plans to incorprate true blogging functions into SM? I came over here from Shopify, and this is one thing I really miss. Fine Art America offers integrated blogging as well.

Hi Tom

I'm a big fan of your sand abstracts.

What exactly are you after? I'd like to help but I'm not sure exactly your pain points.

I've been using Blogger for a long time, am familiar with wordpress, and now with pages on SmugMug. I find that pages are much more flexible and allow for great layouts. I do realize that the tools are slightly different but you can achieve the same results.

And Mark's RSS example below is another good option.

glowrocks

Slightly different. I probably skimmed the article too quickly, but it looks like you have to create a page and then add design elements for each post.

The differences are striking if that's the case, not slight.

tomoscott

Ann McRae wrote: »

Hi Tom

I'm a big fan of your sand abstracts.

What exactly are you after? I'd like to help but I'm not sure exactly your pain points.

I've been using Blogger for a long time, am familiar with wordpress, and now with pages on SmugMug. I find that pages are much more flexible and allow for great layouts. I do realize that the tools are slightly different but you can achieve the same results.

And Mark's RSS example below is another good option.

Hi Ann,
I do have an integrated blog here on SmugMug (http://www.tomoscott.com/Blog). The thing that I miss, that you get on a regular blogging platform, is all the automatic navigation from older to newer entries, auto-formatting, etc. However, I kind of have my blog down to a routine now, but it requires about 10 steps for every entry.

Is there a way that I could create a "template page" for each new blog entry? That would cut out a lot of the steps.

PS - thanks for looking at my Sand Abstracts. I've been moving on to lichen and rocks now too.

denisegoldberg

tomoscott wrote: »

I do have an integrated blog here on SmugMug (http://www.tomoscott.com/Blog). The thing that I miss, that you get on a regular blogging platform, is all the automatic navigation from older to newer entries, auto-formatting, etc. However, I kind of have my blog down to a routine now, but it requires about 10 steps for every entry.

Is there a way that I could create a "template page" for each new blog entry? That would cut out a lot of the steps.

I would agree with everything you've requested (although I don't anticipate moving my blog to smug). In addition, a table of contents and a way to link similar blog entries together is needed.

--- Denise

tomoscott

Here is my blog checklist.

1. Using the other entries as a template, create the main text.
2. Go to Organize Site, and create a new Blog page.
3. Select the new page after saving, and click on the Done button.
4. Make sure there is a default image for the blog page in the Resources/resources folder.
5. Click on the Customize/Customize Site Button. Make sure you have "Just This Page" selected.
6. Delete breadcrumb navigation.
7. Add CSS Placeholder at top of page with blog.css at top of page.
8. Add HTML block with text of new blog entry directly below that.
9. Add Share Buttons below blog text.
10. Add comments block below Share Buttons.
11. Add HTML block with newsletter.html below comments block, but delete first anchor link
regarding free image.
12. Modify menu.php to include the new blog entry.
13. Change Customize setting to "Entire Site"
14. Replace old menu with new one.
15. Modify navigation settings on previous blog entry.
16. Publish all changes and check for errors.

Some of these steps I'd have to do if I used Wordpress. But if we had something like a "blog template" that we could customize, that would eliminate 6 out of my 16 steps. Of course, the blog template page would have to be fully customizable, just like any page would.

A quick way to handle this programatically on SM's end might be to incorporate a function where you could duplicate any page. That way, you could create your own template, and just duplicate it any time you wanted to make a new blog entry.

sgtbilko

markderry wrote: »

Check out this post for instructions on how to hook a blog up with any blog service that has a RSS feed. http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=245283

Here is a working example on my own site: http://www.markderry.com/Pages/Blog/n-xDhFP

Hi Mark
Thanks- what you have is exactly what I want. Is this embedded rss from an external blog to sm or have you built this within smugmug using their folders/pages as per this tutorial? http://school.smugmug.com/SmugMug-Ti...e-a-Photo-Blog
It looks like the latter but you said it was RSS so i am confused!
After having chats with the sm help desk, they said it would be easier/better to use Blogger/WP, so I created a wp blog- see http://vickiwilkinson.wordpress.com Now I don't know how to customise it so that looks like my sm site. At any rate, I prefer the look of yours so whatever you've done, I will try to do i think!
sgtbilko
p.s. sorry for late reply- I've been away!

denisegoldberg

sgtbilko wrote: »

Thanks- what you have is exactly what I want. Is this embedded rss from an external blog to sm or have you built this within smugmug using their folders/pages as per this tutorial? http://school.smugmug.com/SmugMug-Ti...e-a-Photo-Blog
It looks like the latter but you said it was RSS so i am confused!

Mark is using an RSS feed from his blog.

If you want to see an example of the photo blog implementation from http://school.smugmug.com jump back a few posts in this thread and look at tomoscott's site.

--- Denise

sgtbilko

denisegoldberg wrote: »

Mark is using an RSS feed from his blog.

If you want to see an example of the photo blog implementation from http://school.smugmug.com jump back a few posts in this thread and look at tomoscott's site.

--- Denise

Thanks Denise! Your help is much appreciated.

markderry

sgtbilko wrote: »

Hi Mark
Thanks- what you have is exactly what I want. Is this embedded rss from an external blog to sm or have you built this within smugmug using their folders/pages as per this tutorial? http://school.smugmug.com/SmugMug-Ti...e-a-Photo-Blog
It looks like the latter but you said it was RSS so i am confused!
After having chats with the sm help desk, they said it would be easier/better to use Blogger/WP, so I created a wp blog- see http://vickiwilkinson.wordpress.com Now I don't know how to customise it so that looks like my sm site. At any rate, I prefer the look of yours so whatever you've done, I will try to do i think!
sgtbilko
p.s. sorry for late reply- I've been away!

Hi Sgt Bilko,

Did you get your blog working? One tip, I found if you use the smugmug hosted photos in your blog site and arrange it with HTML in your blog the same arrangement comes out on your RSS smugmug page.

Mark

W.W. Webster

tomoscott wrote: »

Here is my blog checklist ...

I just upload a photo, add the title, caption and keywords, and I'm done! Isn't that the way everyone would want to maintain a blog?

Hikin' Mike

W.W. Webster wrote: »

I just upload a photo, add the title, caption and keywords, and I'm done! Isn't that the way everyone would want to maintain a blog?

Not everybody. There are better tools for blogging then using SM to blog. If you just want to blog the occasional photo, SM is fine, but there are better options if you really want to blog regularly.

loonyce

Hi

I was looking to tomoscott blog, http://www.tomoscott.com/Blog, and I was wondering how do make different thumbnails, titles and descriptions for every pages link on the blog? I always got the same when I post a link from my blog to Facebook.

Im still testing the new smugmug and it's not publish yet.

I will be glad if you can help.

denisegoldberg

loonyce wrote: »

I was looking to tomoscott blog, http://www.tomoscott.com/Blog, and I was wondering how do make different thumbnails, titles and descriptions for every pages link on the blog? I always got the same when I post a link from my blog to Facebook.

Did you see this post (earlier in this thread) describing how he creates his blog entries?

--- Denise

tomoscott

loonyce wrote: »

Hi

I was looking to tomoscott blog, http://www.tomoscott.com/Blog, and I was wondering how do make different thumbnails, titles and descriptions for every pages link on the blog? I always got the same when I post a link from my blog to Facebook.

Im still testing the new smugmug and it's not publish yet.

I will be glad if you can help.

You can send me a message on my contact form and I can send you the css, a sample html file for a blog entry, and the checklist. However, you must have some proficiency with css and html, or it won't make any sense to you.

Tom

sgtbilko

markderry wrote: »

Hi Sgt Bilko,

Did you get your blog working? One tip, I found if you use the smugmug hosted photos in your blog site and arrange it with HTML in your blog the same arrangement comes out on your RSS smugmug page.

Mark

Hi Mark

I decided to build it via smugmug in the end as the RSS feed from wordpress was too complicated for me to figure out! Check it out and let me know what you think! Thanks for your help/tips.

vickiwilkinson.com

Sgtbilko

jasenreyes

I have now posted a few blog enries and I although its quite a few steps, I feel like I am starting to get into a bit of a routine. I've created a folder for the blog and have pages within that folder for each of my blog posts. Here is my question. Is there a way to add more text as a description for each page instead of just the title? Perhaps the first paragraph of that blog post or first couple of sentences so the viewer can get a better sense of that is contained within that blog post?

www.jasenreyes.com

Thanks for any input!!!

Jasen

Darter02

W.W. Webster wrote: »

I just upload a photo, add the title, caption and keywords, and I'm done! Isn't that the way everyone would want to maintain a blog?

I was checking out your blog page. It gave me a few ideas. I seem to recall there was a post with details on how you built that page? Any pointers to it?

W.W. Webster

Darter02 wrote: »

I was checking out your blog page. It gave me a few ideas. I seem to recall there was a post with details on how you built that page? Any pointers to it?

It all started here!

Darter02

Cool beans! Thanks!

W.W. Webster

What I've done has been somewhat maligned in some quarters, but it works for me! SmugMug has repeated stated it will not offer a blog feature but, with Zenfolio now providing this capability, I wouldn't be surprised if there was something in the works.

I hope Lamah's code is helpful for you in working out your own strategy. I'll be interested to see what you come up with. Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

Darter02

Currently I'm using a page that was made to look like my landscape galleries. Instead of actual photos, they're all pages. I can then create whatever content I want for each page. Some house only one image, others are travel logs. I then make a post on Blogger mentioning the new page, which then appears on my homepage. The Blogger posts all have the main photo, which is clickable and will open the page on my site. I also post the page URL to Facebook, twitter, G+. I find this generates some traffic.

When I looked at yours I liked how there was a short blurb, and a link to the text. I'm thinking about how I would like to do something similar. I just have to think about it a while, and see what I think will work. Time to go play in my test galleries!

W.W. Webster

The purpose of my blog is very straight forward. I simply want to post a single image on most days (never more than one a day) together with a brief caption. That's it.

Sometimes I include a gallery link in an image caption if I want to direct visitors to additional images related to the same shoot, subject or event. However I don't want to post portfolios of images (that's what my galleries are for), and nor do i want to pontificate at length on the meaning of life, write travelogues or what amount to newsletters.

Many other photo bloggers have broader objectives than mine for which different solutions are needed. Adaptation of a present SmugMug gallery format, as I have done, won't suit them.