KNIT allows any campus member to create an indefinite amount of customizable WordPress websites. For example, you might build a website to:
- Develop your professional or academic online presence
- Create online resources for the public or for student, research, or other communities
- Showcase research and activities of a campus group or lab
- Facilitate collaborative, digital, and/or public-facing research or pedagogy
- Host classroom discussion in a customizable, networked, media-rich environment
- Experiment with digital publishing tools
- Publish academic or student journals
How to:
Check out this great post on The CUNY Academic Commons about using digital commons sites (such as KNIT) to teach.
1. Login to KNIT at http://knit.ucsd.edu/ using the Login links in the upper right area of the page.2. While on the homepage, navigate to and select “Create a Site” in the upper right menu. See image below.
3. You should now be at the site creation page. First choose a domain name for your site (this will be your unique URL), for example, lib1201 (a course number), then enter a title for your blog. (* The title of your site can always be changed, but you cannot edit your domain name (URL).)
4. Adjust “Site Visibility” according to your privacy needs. You can always change this setting later if you want by going the Settings>>Reading in your dashboard.
5. Click the Create Site button.
Congratulations, you have just created a site!
To make a particular post private, follow these steps when you are editing your post: 1.Navigate to the Publish module on the right side of the page. (The Publish module is used to set who can read your posts.)
Under the Visibility area you can choose to make your post either:
- “Password protected” (in which case you will enter a password that you will then share with whomever you wish to view your post) or;
- “Private” (which means that only blog Editors and Administrators will be able to view your post).
Select “OK” then “Publish”/”Update”. These changes will go into effect immediately, but can be updated anytime if you choose to change the visibility of your post.
To adjust the visibility of your individual/group site, please follow the 5 easy steps in this post. (Written for the CUNY Academic Commons but applicable to KNIT.)
WordPress plugins extend the functionality of your site. They are add-on bits of code that let you do neat things. Read more about plugins here and browse WordPress plugins here.
There are thousands of plugins of various qualities, but KNIT only makes a small subset of these available. If you need a plugin that is not available on KNIT, let us know and we can evaluate and install it if it meets our standards and does not closely replicate a plugin we already have.
Please email Erin Glass (erglass@ucsd.edu) if you’d like to see any WordPress plugins activated on KNIT.
This process takes a little time, but enables you to turn your blog into a website. (Written for The CUNY Academic Commons but applicable to KNIT.)
Please check out this post (written for The CUNY Academic Commons but applicable to KNIT).
Make sure that your site has the Akismet plugin activated. Find out more about Akismet, and identifying spam at this post, (written for The CUNY Academic Commons but applicable to KNIT as well).
You can choose to allow or disallow comments on each post or page that you write. To allow comments on a particular post, make sure that the box next to “allow comments on this post” is checked. You can find that box under the main textbox for the post. Here is a screenshot:
This setting may also be set globally by going to Settings>>Discussion and checking or unchecking the “Allow People to Post Comments” box. When you do this, the change will go into effect for all posts made in the future.
Want to add a user to your site? No problem, just follow these 5 simple steps:
- Log into the Dashboard of your blog.
- Navigate to the ‘Users’ tab located in the left navigation bar of your Dashboard and select ‘Add New’. (The ‘Users’ tab is located between the ‘Plugins’ and ‘Tools’ tabs).
- Enter the member’s username (this can be found on their profile page). *Please Note- Only members of the Commons can be added to a site.
- Enter the member’s email address.
- Set the role of the new user to: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor or Subscriber.
A bit about the WPMU member roles: Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features.
Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.
Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts.
Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc.
That person will be sent an email asking them to click a link confirming the invite.
- New users will not need a new username or password to log into the site — once they log into the Commons they will have access to the site under ‘My Sites’ on the top navigation bar
A post is a chronological, journal style entry that has a date and time. A page is a more static type of entry and has the feel of a traditional website. If your site is a “blog” you probably will want your homepage to display your most recent posts. If your site is more of a traditional web site, you might want to assign one of your pages as your homepage. Follow this link for more information.
Each post in WordPress is filed under a category. Thoughtful categorization allows posts to be grouped with others of similar content and aids in the navigation of a site.
A tag is a keyword which describes all or part of a post. Think of it like a category, but smaller in scope. A post may have several tags, many of which relate to it only peripherally. Like categories, tags are usually linked to a page which shows all posts having the same tag. Unlike categories, tags can be created on-the-fly, by simply typing them into the tag field.
Tags can also be displayed in “clouds” which show large numbers of tags in various sizes, colors, etc. Clouds provide a quick way to see predominate tags on the site, allowing people to see the sort of things your site is about.
For more information on Tags and Categories, follow this link
You can find “Best Practices” at WordPress’s Help at Writing Posts.
The Jet Pack plugin is actually a bundle of 16 plugins that have been developed for WordPress.com. Most are free, others are premium plugins that cost money to use. Each plugin can be activated or deactivated according to your needs. If you use a lot of other plugins on your site, you might want to be conservative in what you activate in JetPack – some of your existing plugins may conflict with JetPack’s plugins. (For example, if you have Simplier IPaper activated on your site, and you try to activate Shortcode Embeds, you will get an error. You’ll need to first de-activate Simplier IPaper.)
The screenshot below shows JetPack’s main page:
To use JetPack you’ll need to have a WordPress.com account. This is easy to get, and does not even require starting a WordPress.com blog. Just register here, get your id/password, and you are ready to activate Jet Pack.
JetPack provides a nice stats plugin that you can use to track your readers. It also provides Latex support for mathematical notation, and a bunch of other plugins. Take some time and explore.
This FAQ was adopted from the FAQ on The CUNY Academic Commons, made possible by their generous Creative Commons licensing.