Navigation:

This contains basic link information for your blog to help viewers return to your blog’s Home page or to link to your blog using an RSS reader. This is also where your Avatar is shown.

Admin:

Add Post – Use this link when you want to add a blog post.
Unpublished Posts – This displays a count of unpublished posts. This occurs as you write posts and save them without having the "publish" checkbox checked.
Categories – this is a link to a page that displays the Categories you have set up for your blogs. Here you are able to add, update, and delete categories.
Blog Settings – This link takes you to an administrative settings page for your blog where you are able to edit settings such as Blog Name, URL-Friendly name, Description, Theme, Contact Email, how to handle Comments, and Pingbacks.
Ping Services – This link takes you to an Administrative Services page where you can add, update, and delete Ping services that should receive notifications when you add new posts to your blog.
Unapproved Comments – If your blog allows for comments and you have moderation set, you will see a count here as you receive comments on your posts. Clicking this link will take you to a page where you can review comments that are cued for moderation where it can approved or deleted.

Blog Search:

This search box allows you to do a word search for the blog you are currently viewing.

Tag Cloud:

As you apply tags to your blog posts, the tag cloud will be populated with all of the tag words your blog uses. Tags that occur more frequently will stand out more by being a larger size. Clicking on a tag word will display posts that are tagged with this tag.

Categories:

When you create a blog post, you assign it to one or several Categories. These categories appear as a list in this view with a count of the number of blog posts in that category. Clicking one of these Categories will open all of the posts within that Category. Usually a blog belongs to a few number Categories but have multiple Tags.

Archives:

This is a listing of your posting activity by date. The number of posts published by month will be displayed here. This gives viewers of your blog a useful way to see what blogs are recent or to go back in history to view earlier blogs.

Step by step instructions on getting your blog activated.

1) Log in to portal.

Note: Only portal members can create a blog.

2) Click on the My Blog link in the Site Navigation Bar.

Unless you already activated the blog for your account, you will see a textbox requesting a URL-friendly name for your blog.  Some blog services such as WordPress call this URL-friendly name a “Slug”. This URL-fiendly name is used as part of the URL address for your blog. 

Note: The URL-friendly name cannot have any spaces. Spaces will be replaced with a hyphen if submitted.

Example: The name “Copper Blog” (with a space) will result in the URL-friendly name “Copper-Blog” and the URL for this blog would be http://www.mycopper.net/blogs/Copper-Blog

The URL-friendly name can be changed on the following screen or any time after your blog has been created.

Warning: changing your URL-friendly name at a later time once your blog has been established may result in broken links  to your blog and will compromise any search engine rankings for your posts.

3) You should now be at the Blog Settings tab of your account profile.

Note: This can be accessed any time by selecting Profile. When you hover over your account name in the Site Navigation Bar, select the Blog Settings tab.

Default values for your blog’s details have already been filled in for you. To begin blogging right away, you can click the Save Settings button or make any needed changes and then click the Save Settings button.

The following is a description of the settings that can be modified:

4) That's it! View your blog and begin blogging.

Once your settings are saved, you can view your blog by selecting the hyperlink of your blog. This is shown after the Save Settings button or at the top of the settings fields labeled Blog: [URL-friendly name].