January 19, 2010

Blurb Management

How to manage blurbs
What are Blurbs?

LiveWhale Blurbs are a way to post short announcements, status updates, and so forth.  They are similar to News stories, but they have no headline and are usually kept brief.  Most sites have no active Blurbs Widgets to display your group’s blurbs online, but this can be changed by contacting New Media.

Managing Blurbs

From the LiveWhale control panel, click the “Blurbs” tab. The manage blurbs screen will list all blurbs in your group.

From left to right, each blurb displays:

  • A checkbox allowing you to select multiple blurbs and perform bulk actions from the “With checked items…” dropdown menu. Available actions include: delete, remove tags, move to archive, add star, remove star, set status, and add tag. Check the checkbox next to the blurbs you wish to apply an action to, then select the desired action from this menu and click the “Go” button. Use the “select all” link to select all items in the list.
  • A star. Click on the star to flag the blurb as important. These items can optionally be highlighted on your web page, or you may choose to only display starred blurbs with your widget.
  • The status menu. If you wish to change the status of blurbs, select the appropriate status here. “Live” will publish the item immediately, “Hidden” will hide the item from your web site until you are ready to publish it.
  • Summary of the blurb text. Click the blurb to edit it.
  • If the blurb is tagged, a list of these tags will appear beside it. Clicking a tag will tell the blurbs manager to only show blurbs with that tag.
  • Beneath the blurb is its date.
  • Use the preview link to preview this item as it will appear on the public web site.
  • To the right of the blurb is the balloons feature, which will allow you to rank your blurbs according to their importance. The more balloons, the higher the blurb appears in blurb lists on your web site. Click the gray balloon to add more, and click on the red balloons to drop them back down in the list. When an item reaches the maximum ten balloons, it will become a gold balloon.

When certain elements are modified (such as blurb status), a message saying “Your changes to this page have not been saved” will be displayed. Click the “Save These Changes” button to save the changes you have made.

To add a new blurb, click the “Add a New Blurb” link.

A “Show by category” dropdown menu is available to display blurbs in the selected category.

A “Show by tag” dropdown menu is available to display blurbs tagged with the selected item.

The blurbs manager is divided into three sections, accessible by the links beneath the tab bar: Blurbs, Archive, and Categories.

Adapted from: http://support.livewhale.net/support.php?id=69