Create a blog at Family Tree and tell the world who you are!

Blogging at Family Tree will help you share your stories, blog about your research and discoveries, keep up to date with friends and share details of your family history research.

Click here to start your own blog today.

What is a Familyblog?

A Familyblog is a personal diary of your own family history. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A research tool. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of your favorite Ancestry links. Your own private thoughts. Even a photo album of your family and its history.

Your blog is whatever you want it to be. All we ask is that your blog deals in some way with the subject of Family History or Genealogy.

In simple terms, a blog is your own web site, where you write stuff and add pictures on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what’s new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.

Thats all, its Free, so why not click here to begin…

Family Blogs Help

1. Once you have registered your blog and validated your account, via the email you will receive, you will be able to visit your blog at the address provided, this will be

  www.family-tree.co.uk/familyblogs/*YourAccountName*

You will then be presented with the layout below, which is a new blog complete with sample post and sample comment…

If you would like to open these instuctions in a new window to follow as you make your post click here.

2. To log into your blog click the ‘Log-in‘ link [If you are already logged in to your account you will instead see a ‘Site Admin‘ link, if you can see a ‘Site Admin‘ link then skip to part 5

3. Once you have clicked ‘Log-in‘ you will see the following screen

4. Enter your Username and Password, as you will have received in your original registration email. You can also click ‘remember me‘ which will allow you to skip this page in the future.

5. Congratulations, you have now logged in to your blog. This is the Admin area where you will
  be able to add/edit and delete posts, as well as changing the style and options of your blog. The screen will look like this:

6. To get started click ‘Write a post‘ you can either click the link in the text or the ‘Write‘ link in the top menu.

7. This is the main screen for creating your blog, there are several boxes that can help to organise your blog and its archives but for now we will concentrate on what it takes to make a post.

8. To begin your post first you need to think of a headline, Once you’ve got this, enter it into the ‘Title‘ box which is at the top.

Once you’ve done that you can enter your content of your post into the ‘Post‘ Box, simply write in this box as you would in an email. If you want to Spell check your post you can click on the ABC symbol along the top of this box.

Once you have finished composing your post you can click the ‘Publish‘ button, which will send it straight to your blog, or, you can ‘Save‘ the post this will store the post within the Admin area allowing you to publish it when you want. However before publishing this post we are also going to add an image to our post.

9. To insert an image from your computer onto your blog, you will need to use the ‘Upload box‘

Click on the ‘Browse‘ button and locate the file on your computer. Once you have done this click the ‘Upload‘ button.

10. You will now see the image in the ‘Upload box‘. You can choose the size of the image, to

  show a Thumbnail or its actual Full size, and also if you want to link the image to a webpage or

  a larger version of itself. In this case I’ve chosen the simplest solution, Full Size image and No link… Then, to add the image we click the place within the post window where we want it to

  appear and then click ‘Send to Editor‘

The image will then appear in the ‘Post‘ box.

If you are happy with this you can then ‘Publish‘ your post and the post will appear in your blog.

Editing and deleting posts.

11. To edit your posts, or to delete the first ’sample’ post you can click the ‘Manage‘ text in the top menu of the admin section or, if your not logged in, follow steps 1 to 5 above, and then click the ‘Manage‘ tab. This will then bring you to the following page.

Here you will see a list of your previous posts. You can click the links to the right of each post to either View, Edit or Delete your posts. You may also see posts listed as Your Drafts which are posts that you’ve saved instead of published.

The Edit button will take you to a page very similar to the ‘Write‘ page.

The only differences are in the buttons at the end of the post. Here your options are either to ‘Save‘ the edits you’ve made - this will publish the edited version of the Post. The other option is to ‘Save and Continue Editing‘, which is much as its sounds, it saves and published the

  post but remains on the editing page for you to go on making edits.

12. We decided to edit the placement of the image we added in step 10. To do this we click the image in the Post box and then click the Square image symbol of a tree above the Post box, as illustrated below.

This will then give you a box where you can edit how your image will look, align it to the left or the right, add a border, or edit the size. Once your finished, click Update.

We aligned our image to the left and decided against a border, now here is our post.

Much better.
 

Family Blog Style and Layout - Choosing a new look…

1. Log in to your Blogs admin panel, ( simply follow steps 2 to 5 of the previous article). You will then be presented with the admin layout below:

2. Click on the ‘Presentation‘ tab on the top menu, this will take you to the following screen:

3. Simply browse the selection of Blog styles on the page and click on the one you want to try on your blog…

4. Congratulations, you have now changed the theme/style of your blog, you will see the following confirmation screen:

5. Click any of the ’View site‘ links to view your blog in the new style:

6. If you like that style, then you are finished, if not, simply go back and choose another.