Thursday, January 4, 2007

Using the TILT blog

We have intentionally chosen to use a blog rather than traditional website in order to emphasize the community-oriented nature of TILT. A blog is more accessible, grassroots, dynamic, and more accurately reflects the changing 'organisim' which any community is. That being said, all the vitals are still available on the blog, usually in the sidebar.
TILT's website actually consists of five different blogs. A blog consists of "posts" - sorted by date, each with a Title and then associated content. The "title" of this post is "Using the TILT blog" and you are reading the "content" right now! Each blog is always accessible by the buttons underneath the header at the top of the page:At the bottom of every post you will see something like this:There is lots to do here! The dynamic nature of a blog allows users to post comments and spark online discussion regarding certain posts. Simply click on "Comments" at the bottom of an post. To learn more about comments, read about them on Blogger's Help Pages. Note: simply select "Other" and input your name when adding a comment. A major upgrade in the latest blog technology is the use of labels. Every post will have 'labels' attached to it, which are also found at the bottom of the post (see above image). For example, the sermon notes from December 12, 2006 on Luke 2 might have the labels "Luke", "Advent", "sermon", "notes", etc. If you would like to see every sermon on this blog on "Luke", all you have to do is click on the "Luke" label at the bottom of the post, and tada! every post with the label "Luke" will miraculously appear on your screen.
The sidebar of each blog contains much goodness and usefulness. Every blog will have specific links related to its section, such as these ones for the TILT art section:There is also a search box such as this one for the Daily@TILT:Simply type in something you are looking for, and if any post in that blog contains the word, it will come up! We are currently trying to make it so the search will simultaneously check ALL the TILT blogs. No success thus far.
Finally, the fun of the "Label Clouds"! Here is one example from TILT art:The label cloud displays all the labels used within the blog. To get all the posts with a specific label, simply click on the desired word. The label cloud's beauty is that the more often a label is used in the posts, the bigger the font and the more red it gets. So, you can visually see the popular labels etc. The desired effect is to have a "cloud" with varied text sizes and colours.

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