Step # 1: Sign up for your Gravatar account.

Signup at http://www.gravatar.com. All you need is your email address! Use the same email address you used to create your nazareneblog account. You will then receive a confirmation email including a link that will activate your Gravatar account and allow you to set your password.

Step # 2: Set up a password.

Click on the link in the confirmation email. You will then be taken to a page where you will be asked to type in your password. Set your password.

Step # 3: Upload a picture, set up your Gravatar

You are now told you have no gravatar. Click on Add a new one. You can choose and upload this image from your computers hard drive, from the internet somewhere or use a webcam to capture a new photo. The picture can be anything you like.

Step # 4: Crop your picture and set up a rating for your picture.

Yes, you get to set a rating for the picture you just uploaded as G, PG, R or X rated. X rated means you uploaded an inappropriate picture. We’ll ask that all bloggers here go ahead and use a G rated picture. Thanks

Step # 5: Associate your Gravatar with your Email address

This is the last step. Once the image is uploaded click on it and click confirm to associate that picture with the email address you signed up with. Once done you are all set. As long as you are logged in, any blog post or comment you post on another blog will show your Gravatar.

-special thanks to our blog technical crew for writing these instructions-

We have noticed that periodically someone will write a blog post eluding to the frustration of writing blogs but having very few if anyone read it.  This is a very valid concern as many of you are new bloggers.  It does take a little effort in order to make your blog known.  Here are a few tips that may be helpful to you if you are feeling that your blog is not being interacted with.

1.  Be active in reading other people’s blog posts and make comments when you have something to add.

2.  Notify your circle of friends and colleagues that you have a blog by posting links to your blog on emails, e-newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

3.  Make sure to also provide an address to your blog in offline literature like business cards, Letterhead, church bulletin(if appropriate), etc.

4.  Aggregate helpful links to other blogs or resources online.  Many of your readers will find these link helpful and could bring them back to your blog periodically, hoping to find more helpful links.

5.  Don’t blog about yourself exclusively.  A blog is not typically a personal diary.  Often you will be blogging out of personal experience but if you want to author a blog that others find valuable to them you need to make sure to add in pertinent anecdotes and examples that you may find in your research.

6  Again, if you want to author a blog that others find valuable you need to step back and view it from their perspective.  Always try to provide a “take away” in your blog.  Ask yourself what point you are trying to make or the lesson you are trying to instill?

7.  If you have a friend or colleague that has an established blog you might ask them to write a guest post on your blog.  You might even give them a specific topic you would like them to write about.

8.  At the end of your posts encourage readers to comment and discuss the topic.  Even suggest that they ask questions or suggest future blogs topics.  Become a resource to them.

Those of you who follow the Nazarene Blogs RSS feed have no doubt noticed that there have been hundreds of attempts to open blog accounts in our environment.  These are seen in the RSS feed as Hello World titles.  We have purged most of them from the RSS feed but to this point none of the security measures we have implemented have been able to stop the sign-up attempts.  We obviously do not approve these blog requests but the numerous attempts to sign up are annoying to those of us that watch the RSS feed for new blog posts.

For the time being we have disabled the mechanism to sign up for a new blog.  We will open this back up as soon as we stop these fraudulent blog requests.  Thanks for your understanding and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you so much for being part of our community.  We are happy to say our blogging environment continues to grow almost daily.  We encourage you to stay active and keep those new posts coming.

We have recently revisited our Terms of Use document for all of our online presence.  This also affects the Terms of Service for the blogging environment.  We would ask that you take a moment and review the section of our Terms of Service at:  http://nazareneblogs.org/terms-of-service/and if you want to read through the entire Terms of Use document on our websites found at: http://www.nazarene.org/ministries/administration/termsofuse/display.aspx

If you feel that any of your blog posts violate our terms please consider erasing that post(s). If you have questions as to the content of your blogs please feel free to contact us.

We appreciate your understanding on these matters.  Should you disagree with our position on acceptable blog content we are sorry and will hate to see you blog elsewhere but we will also understand and wish you the best of luck.

Nazarene Blogs Team

Due to user request, we have recently installed the IntenseDebate plugin for all users of Nazarene Blogs to utilize.

IntenseDebate is an “intense” plug-in for comments. It augments/replaces the Wordpress comment system with a much more robust system, that includes threading, comment-voting, user login via Facebook and Twitter (so you don’t have register to yet another site to add comments), gravitar support,  moderation via email, subscribe to comments etc. Blog administrators get a full suite of management tools, including “theme-ing” the comments section, auto-moderation features, spam-prevention, user banning, profanity-filters, and a lot more.

To begin using IntenseDebate go to http://intensedebate.com/ and sign up for a free account.  Then come back to your blog admin window and select the setting link on top right side of the window. In the next window select Intense Debate from the list of settings along the top.

We hope this is a useful tool to our bloggers.  It is not a required tool.  The other comments engine will still work.  This is just another option for you.  Let us know how you like it.  Let us know if you have questions too.

Hopefully this will be a good way to highlight and find some exceptional talent.

• RSS Feed: NazareneBlogs
• RSS Feed: All NazareneBlogs

As you may guess the “All NazareneBlogs” link will give you a feed of new posts from any of the blogs in the NazareneBlogs family.

We hope you enjoy the new feature, I know my iGoogle page is now much more interesting.