We’ve put together a series of tutorials for people new to blogs. Because blogs look like a normal website, but work in some counter-intuitive ways, it can be a bit confusing for newbies. Hopefully these Tips will help get you up to speed.

• Part I Navigation In this first lesson we introduce the basics. How to differentiate between the various views seen in the blog and how to move back and forth.
• Part II Links, Landing and Leaving In this second lesson we describe how to find the right link to a post or the blog, so that you can share it with others. Also how to get around a new blog when you ‘land’ there from an external link.
• Part III  Comments, Searching & Tags In this third lesson we describe how to read and leave comments, plus find old and new (to you) posts with the Category, Tags and Search tools.
• Part IV  RSS Feeds In this fourth lesson we introduce RSS Feeds, and show you how to set one up with a subscription to our blog updates. You can also use these to get updates from many of your other favorite websites.
• Part IVa RSS Feeds for your Home Page – If you are only going to follow a small number of blogs you can set things up to see the RSS Feed on your Home Page. We show you how to do this with both the Yahoo and Google home pages.
• Staying Up To Date Now that you’ve graduated, you will want to stay up-to-date with our blog. There are a number of ways.

Update 2012: The WSJ have begun limiting access to articles from a Google search, so the following TIP will sometimes fail.

Wall Street Journal Tip. At times we link to an article in the Wall Street Journal, but unless you have an online subscription they will spank you and suggest paying up in order to read the entire article.  I don’t have any hesitation to share the following hack, since it’s a fairly well-known trick.

• When you click on a link to the WSJ article, you will find the article’s title and the first paragraph. And a notice that you need to subscribe to read the entire article.
• At this point, highlight the title in your browser window and copy it.
• Now open a google search box, either on the same page or a new page. It must be a google search, as the WSJ will only open the gates to google. Go figure.
• At the beginning of the search box, type “Wall Street Journal” without the quotes. Then enter a space and paste the title of the article which you just copied into the google search box and search away.
• When the results come up, look carefully at the choices. One of them will be on the Wall Street Journal’s site and that’s the link you want to click. Often there will be other hits, but they will be on other sites who are quoting the original article; you don’t want to click one of those.
• And presto…you should now be on the WSJ site with the entire article available to read!