(Via Karen)
When you create a story, you will see a box (titled “admin”) at the bottom of the story (after you click the submit button, it doesn’t show while the text box is open) that says: Do you want to….and then you have three choices (remove this story from the stories list, turn on the byline for this story, or set a relative path for this story). If you choose the last option (set a relative path for this story) then you can create an easy to remember url for the story (instead of the true URL). This is done by using this format (foldername/filename). So, if you want to create a relative path for a story, you might decide that you are going to have your students use their last name, first initial as the folder name and then they give unique filenames to their stories. So, one thing you might do is this:
Ask each student to create a story that will serve as their home page within the blog. After they create the story they would then go to the admin box of that story and click on the “set a relative path for this story” and in the path text box they would write “mccomask/home” and that would be my home page. I could then reach that page by using the base URL for the blog and appending mccomask/home to that to reach that page. That means for my blog I could then go to http://www.muwp.org/mccomas/mccomask/home and reach that page. Students could then use that page to tell about themselves and provide links to the other writings they will have in that blog. Therefore, on the next day when I create my first story, I would put my writing in then set the relative path to mccomask/story1 and on my home page I would put the http://www.muwp.org/mccomas/mccomask/story1 link so that folks could reach that story. The other cool thing is that if you would go to http://www.muwp.org/mccomas/mccomask/ and not list a filename, the blog would automatically list all of my writings.

This is a really powerful tool, the relative path thingy, and I’ll be glad to try to explain more but why don’t you give it a try as I’ve explained it so far and see how that looks to you. Let me know where my instructions are not clear.
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The members of educational Bloggers Network (eBN) are working to instill several generations of young people with the values and concepts of narrating the work, sharing their knowledge, and thinking out loud. By the time these young people enter the workforce such ideas will no longer seem foreign, outlandish, or wasteful. Rather, they will be seen as ways to do more, learn more, and earn more. We won’t have to spend 90 percent of our effort just convincing people to share. The change won’t happen immediately, and it won’t happen soon enough to help some of us at all. But it will happen. And because it will happen we need to support efforts like eBN in whatever ways we can. These people are on to something that matters. We should help.

This is definitely the kind of thinking that will bring all of this to more and more teachers and educators. Well said!
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Laura Rebecca at Garden City High School on Long Island has a Web log started for her Film classes. I think it’s pretty interesting that many of us if not most of us took the same route that she is, starting with Blogger. On the eBN site, (which is looking mighty fine) Terry recounts the same route. It really is a very painless intro to the concept, and it really helped develop my understanding and thinking of the whole concept. I might have given up had I started with Manila! I’m wondering what, if anything, Google will be doing with Blogger in the future.
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In the last week I’ve lost two sites to the error message that says “Sorry! There was an error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “department” hasn’t been defined.” I can get to the sites by typing in the URL of a subpage, but the homepages all come up with the error. And all of the departments when clicked, produce the same error. Ken experienced the same message but was unable to get a fix. I’m going to post to Newbies, but if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.