Nikon Forums Member Blogs: How-To Guide

Welcome to the Nikon Forums member blog system! This section of our site allows individual members to maintain their own personal blogs for free. You can either have us host your blog or link to an external blog that you already have. You can choose to blog about your own photos, Nikon cameras, lenses, technique, or just about anything else related to photography!

You can also use our blog system to maintain a homepage for special interst groups or camera clubs. The creator of such a blog will be able to specify which members are allowed to view it.

To get started, make sure you're logged in. Then, click on "member blogs" in the navbar on the left side of the page, as shown above. This will take you to an index page showing the latest blog posts. On that page you should see a big blue button that reads "Create a Blog":

Next, accept the terms & conditions, and then follow the on-screen prompts. You will be asked to choose a title for your blog and enter a description. This is also where you select whether or not your blog will be hosted locally. Note that if you choose to link an external blog, the number of configuration options available to you will be limited.

For the purposes of this guide, let's assume that you're creating a local blog hosted by us. Once you submit the form above, you will be taken to a page with various settings:

Here you can set up who is allowed to see your blog, manage comments, and even add other members as editors if you'd like to work on a blog together. Once you submit this form you will be taken to the blog management page, which shows you an overview of all your current blogs. You can only create up to two blogs as a regular member, but if you'd like to start more (i.e. add multiple club blogs), making a donation to NikonForums.com will increase your quota to 10 blogs.

Click on the name of the new blog to the taken to the blog's homepage, or use one of the shortcut links under the options button for quick access to various areas of your blog.

From this page, you can manage the blog's categories, import posts from an RSS feed (i.e. if you'd like to copy over posts from an earlier blog of yours), change settings, and of course add new posts. For blog owners, the blog homepage will also allow you to customize the blocks that are shown alongside your blog. They can be rearranged using drag-and-drop. The "Add Blocks" button lets you add new pre-configured blocks, and you can even add a block that contains custom content, such as links to your favorite web pages or forum posts.

To create a blog post, it is enough to click on the big "Add Entry" button in the upper-right corner of the page. This will take you to the entry editor, which looks just like the editor used in our forum:

This powerful editor lets you choose a thumbnail for your blog post and upload as many photos as you'd like. You can select one or more categories for your post, publish it right away or schedule it, and even add a poll to the post. By default, your post will be saved as a draft. You can choose to publish it after submitting it, or publish it right away by clicking on the "publish" button. If you always want to publish by default, visit your blog settings and check the corresponding checkbox.

While we place no limit on the number of files you upload, a global 10Mb limit applies for regular members. You can of course always embed external photos or embed attachments you've uploaded to our forum or gallery. Finally, if you'd like to increase your disk space limit, by donating you will get a much higher quota of 200Mb.

Once you submit your post, you can of course edit it or delete it. You can also submit it to blog sharing websites.

 

We hope that you enjoy our blog system and that it is put to good use! Since your blog posts will be shown in feeds on our front page and the forum index, they should get plenty of exposure. Other users can also comment on and share your blogs via social media channels.

We want to keep our blog section as open as possible. Therefore, we will not be actively moderating, editing, or filtering blog content. All we ask is that you do not abuse this system by using it for spam, illegal material, or mere promotion of external content. We do welcome links to external sites, resources, and deals, but please keep them within the context of your post. Abuse of our blog system will not be tolerated and will result in immediate loss of blogging priviliges.

Finally, if you plan to include any adult content in your blogs, please limit it to tasteful artistic nudity only. Any blog containing adult content must clearly indicate this in its title, and please ensure adult images comply with our forum rules. In order to keep our site family-friendly, we may take additional steps to restrict user access to adult content.