Tip - Tell Your Readers Who You Are

a tip from Deirdré Straughan

One thing I find a bit frustrating about Sun blogs is that, while full of useful information, they rarely tell me much about just who is supplying all this wonderful material. The only one I've found so far with a bio (I have not viewed all 3300 yet!) is Jonathan's (who arguably needs it least). Okay, Linda Skrocki has FAQs.

Blogs by nature are usually personal (even when they're on technical topics), and blog readers like to be "introduced" to the person whose words they are reading. So it's a good idea to have an "About Me" page where your readers can learn a bit about who you are, and why they should read your words of wisdom.

 I think some blogging software has a built-in "About the Author" option, but I can't find such a thing in Roller, the blog software we're using. So what follows is a bit of a hack...

How to Add an "About Me" Page to Your Sun Blog

1. Create a New Entry.
2. Title it "About Me".
3. Write something about yourself, ideally something that is going to convince people that what you have to say is worth reading. If you're primarily writing technical articles, it would be nice to know "who made you the expert?" (Presumably you did - but I'd like to know how.)

You could also (would you, please?!?) link to:

• pages about the products you work on,
• any documents related to those products,
• any documents you have authored, and
• anything else (both in and out of sun.com) that might be useful to your readers in exploring further the topics you're covering.

This is good practice to help your readers get the most out of your blog, and these links help build up search engine ranking (and traffic) for Sun sites overall.

Optional but nice: add a photo

1. First, edit the photo to a reasonable size (300-500 pixels wide is about right) in whatever photo editor you like.
2. In the Create & Edit tab, select File Uploads. Tip: NEVER navigate away from your Edit Entry page without hitting "Save as Draft" first - Roller may dump all your edits (very annoying).
3. Browse to your file and upload it.
4. When the upload is finished, you'll see a green rectangle in the top of the screen with the URL of your newly-uploaded file; copy that URL.
5. Return to the About Me entry you were editing, and click the Add Picture icon in the Content menu (you are using the WYSIWYG editor for your blog, right...?).
6. A dialog box will open where you can paste that URL you just copied for your picture.
7. Save, and you'll be back in the editor with your picture in your blog post.

 Final Steps

1. Publish your About Me post.
2. View it on your blog and make sure everything's as you like it.
3. Copy the URL to this post (for example, by right-clicking on the title About Me and selecting Copy-Link Location (in Firefox).
4. Back in the editor, in the Create & Edit tab, select the Bookmarks item.
5. Select Add Bookmark in the blue menu area on the right of the page.
6. Name your bookmark: About Me, optionally add a Description, and for the Bookmark URL paste in the URL you just copied.Save.
7. Back on your published blog (reload the page if necessary), you should now see a Link category in the secondary column to the right or left of your text (depending on the blog theme you've chosen). "About Me" is likely (by sheer force of alphabetization) to be the first item in there, followed by blogs.sun.com and other standard links pre-set for you.

Now you've got an About Me page.