WL_Blog_1280x720.mp4

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In this tutorial, I'm going to be discussing the blog widget

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Now a blog in case you're not familiar, it's basically a collection of articles that's usually written by a single person or a small team

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And it's usually about a specific subject topic, idea, pretty much whatever you want to write about

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But it usually focuses around something specific

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And blogs let you write multiple articles and organize them easily

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So if you want to create a blog, you can pretty much write a blog about whatever you want

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That's the beauty of the internet

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And in order to create one, you would simply add a widget

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And it's right there near the top

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Once you've created the blog, it's going to add the blog widget to that page

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It's not necessary, but it's general, common practice that blogs are dedicated to their own page

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But you can do whatever you want with the widgets

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And once you create that blog widget, I'm going to open this one, which is already pre -made

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But we're going to go through all the details to see how everything works

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You would create your title up here as well as your subtitle

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And this list items is going to be completely empty when you first create a blog

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So let's go ahead and open one

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And once you click add a new item to the list, it's going to create a new list item

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So let's go ahead and open one and see what that looks like

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And then let's open that corresponding article in the blog

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So you can see that it's pretty simple once you get into everything

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The title is right there on the top

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And the subtitle is right below that

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The abstract is what showed on the list for the article

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You can see the abstract is what shows below the title of the main article on the list

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And that's good for discussing the article a little bit or telling about what it's about

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And then the main text is right there below that

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You can see that's all the main text

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And I put in a little test 1, 2, 3 in there

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And that's just a little test so we can test out the search engine in the search bar

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Because you can always add a search bar so users can find articles easier

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Once you have all of your main text and everything, you can also add some additional stuff, such as if you wanted this to be published later, then currently you can schedule a specific publishing date and

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time

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So you would actually be able to select the time and date

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And you can determine if this is going to be published later or if it's going to be published in a draft form

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And a draft is basically not visible to actual users

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It'd be visible to you so you can kind of preview it

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But you can always publish things for later

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You can also add images

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And this is going to add an image to the actual list article

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You have a list of articles

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So if you add an image and then it's going to refresh the page

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And you can see right there, now it's above the actual title for the list of articles

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And if you were to click that, you can see it adds the picture there as well

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So this is the picture for the article

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You can also do multiple pictures

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So if you add multiple pictures, it'll turn this into a slider that will slide back and forth

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And you can even do videos

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So if you want, you can add a video to this

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And when you save and update that, it still has that picture for the article

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But now when you open this, it's going to show that video

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So you can actually click that video and play a video right for your article, which is pretty neat

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And you can also add buttons

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So if you want to add links or email me or anything like that, you can add a button

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And that's gone over in the buttons tutorial

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So please watch that tutorial to understand more about buttons

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You can also add an author and a date by scrolling down and selecting the author and date tab

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And once you type in an author's name and a date, you can also type in a bio as well

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And then the way blogs work as far as organization is they are organized in the most recent article first

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So it's usually in like the reverse order that you create them because old articles are going to be at the bottom

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The ones that you create first and the newer most recent articles are going to be at the top

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So if you choose a date, it's going to arrange your blog automatically

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So now it brought that title one that was on the bottom and brought it back up to the top because this is now the most recent article

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And you can see the author's name right there

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And if you were to click it, the article and read about it at the bottom, there would be the bio about the authors

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This is a neat little way to just talk about yourself or if you have multiple authors, you can say who actually wrote that particular article

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You can also schedule events

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So if you have like a special event, you want people to attend

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You can schedule a date and time in the calendar and people will be able to download this to their calendars on their phone or to their icon on their iPhone

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And that's an easy way to organize events

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You can also add maps to the blog as well

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So if you have a specific location or something happens similar specific, you can simply type the address in and it'll automatically create a map for you

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So once you open up that article, that article now has a map available

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And you can also add like files and attachments

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So if you wanted someone to be able to like download something, you can add a file or like a picture, for example

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Once you upload it to the servers, people would be able to then open that article and there'll be a button to download that particular file

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The download file and then that'll take them to that image that they downloaded

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And that's an easy way to like add articles, you know, sorry, add maps, add pictures, add files to your article

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And you can also organize it for SEO

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This is a little bit more advanced

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And we're going to go over this in the more advanced tutorials

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But this is for SEO and Facebook and social media organization

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So once you've added everything you want for that particular article and you're happy with the way that article looks, you can then continue organizing and creating your next articles

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You would simply go back to the blog and you would click add a new item to the list

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And then that'll add a new item and you would simply do the same thing

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So you can see here I have multiple articles here

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It was in reverse order as you can see in the beginning, but now it's switched up a little bit because we added this date

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And like I said before blogs always show the most recent articles first

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So if you added dates to these ones, these ones would flip up on top instead because these would now be the most recent

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And if you want to organize your page and people to be able to search your page, you'd use the search

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So this is pretty simple once you get into it as well

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Clicking this button here will let you add a search bar to the top of the blog

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So once you turn that on, it'll add a search bar that'll let users search for particular keywords or topics

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So let's say you were read an article a while ago and you couldn't remember what article that was but it was about a specific subject

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You would simply type in that keyword

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Remember that test 1, 2, 3 I typed into that other article and this was for this search

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And if they click that search, you can see there's the first article that contains that particular keyword

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And you can also search for maps

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If you have the maps, you can show the distance relating to maps as well

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And you can also determine the amount of articles per page and how those pages are organized

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So see here this items per page will let you determine how many items on a particular page

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If you leave it at 0, it'll just show everything on the one page

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So if you type in 2 here and you see here on the left, this is going to show the pages as normal where it shows a page count and buttons

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And then we'll go over the other option right now

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So once you click and say that, you'll see there's now only the two articles and there's the buttons for left and right, which is the page count and buttons

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So once they click those buttons, it'll take them to the next page and they can go back and forth

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And you can also determine whether it's a show me more button

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So when you click this, it'll show a button that says show more down on the bottom

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And then when they click that, it'll load everything within the same page

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See that show more button

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Now when I click that, it loads more articles in

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So that's an easy way to organize pages

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Now let's put everything back on one page and I'll show you how to organize the particular articles themselves

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So like I said before, blogs usually are organized from the most recent article to the oldest article

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Usually because no one wants to read the old articles, it's the more recent ones that are more important

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But if you want to organize them differently, you can do here with the items order

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You can go from oldest to most recent if you want to do that instead and go in like reverse order or you can manually organize it

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So when you click that, you'll be able to go back to the main blog page and you can organize the articles manually by clicking and dragging the particular list items

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And you can see how once I bring it on top it now organizes however it's listed in this particular box

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So that's an easy way to organize the articles

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And you can also add additional tabs and even upload from an RSS feed

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And that's a little bit more advanced tutorial and we're going to go over that in a separate tutorial

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But as far as the particular articles go, if you want to organize them within the same page, you would use the list style and layout

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This is for a single page

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So you see how everything is organized on one page here and it's all in one column here and on desktop it says two

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So if you go to the desktop and view this full site, you can see there it is two on two as opposed to the mobile, which is just the one

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If you wanted to change that and determine how it's organized within the pages, you would simply adjust this

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So if you wanted to do two columns on mobile and three on desktop, you would simply switch that and when you save it, you can see it has now organized that on two on two

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And if you go back to the desktop and refresh this, see it is now the three on top and then the one on the bottom because there's only four

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But that's an easy way to organize them within the same page

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You can also determine whether the text is above below or to the left or right of the image

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And on desktop versus mobile, you can determine that separately so you can have completely different looks on the desktop and mobile

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And that's that mobile first technology, hard at work, being completely separate from each other

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You can also determine the shape that the image is in

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So you see here on the right, this is just a regular box with square corners

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If you wanted to put that in a box with rounded corners, you can set that and that's going to shave off the corners for you automatically and make a nice little rounded picture or rounded box

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And then you can have a completely round picture and then I'll shave it off into a full circle

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And for the modal, this is whether it's opened in a page or a modal

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So generally, blogs are opened in pages

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So when you click it, this is going to take you to this particular article in its own page

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See how I would have to read this article or however on its separate page and then click the back button if I want to go back to the main list of articles

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That's a traditional way of doing it

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You can also do the modal if you want as well

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So a modal is sort of like a separate pop up

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That's going to pop up within that same page

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So once you set a modal, you can save that

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And instead of opening up in a separate page, you can see it's going to pop up with its own kind of floating page in front of the main one

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You can read the article and do whatever you want

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And then when you exit, it's going to slide away and then go back to that main page

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So that's a neat little effect as well

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And you can also determine if it's in accordion, which is pretty neat

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So what that's going to do is that's just going to scrunch everything into an accordion style

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And that's going to put them all in one line right here or it's going to put them all in smaller boxes basically

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And you can determine how that's organized with the columns here

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I generally like to keep this one column when it comes to an accordion

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So everything's just in a line and when you click in accordion, that'll open up the article in that same page

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So it'll open up and shrink it

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And that's what it means by an accordion style

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And like I said, I usually keep it in a single column because if you do multiple columns for mobile, it gets too small to read sometimes

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And that's a neat little way to organize that as well

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And for the additional options, they're just like all the other widgets

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You can determine whether users have to be logged in, whether or not it's mobile only or desktop only so you can have different blogs from mobile versus desktop

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And the additional styles are just like all the other widgets

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I suggest maybe experimenting with this a little bit

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You can set backgrounds, different animations, and how much space it takes up on the desktop

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So once you get into it, it's blogs are pretty easy to use

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You would basically just create your articles

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As you go along, you can determine how they're organized right over in the items order

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And then a blog is an easy way to get your ideas out there or to create multiple articles on a single topic

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And once you get used to the blog widget, it's pretty easy to use