Instructions For The Blog

POEMS

  1. Click ~ on the blog page.
  2. Go To Write
  3. Write Post. Give it a category.
  4. Either Save. , or if you want it to go the Blog straight away, Publish.

If you want to embed a single image in the poem post:
Method 1 - Uploading the image to the blog:

  1. Upload the file (jpg) using the Upload tab on the Write Post or Manage Post pages. You don’t need to give a title or description, but if you do, you will find it easier to locate later in Manage Files. Wait for it to upload.
  2. Make sure the Browse tab is open in the Upload area (below the positing area).
  3. Click on the image you want to embed. A menu will drop down with (using Thumbnail, Not Linked etc)
  4. You click on ‘Send to Editor’ to get the full picture in the Blog. A load of tag stuff will come into the editor. The menu has two modes, either ‘Using Original’ or ‘Using Thumbnail’. Click on the ‘Using’ to change mode from one to the other. You can also toggle whether it is linked to the original or not.

Method 2: Linking to Flickr:

  1. Find the photo on Flickr, the exact one in the exact size you are interested in.
  2. Right Mouse Click on the mage. Go ‘Copy Image Location’ in Firefox, and that copies the URL of the exact image you are viewing to the clipboard.
  3. Back in your post editor, click the [img] button on the editor bar.
  4. In the URL, just paste the EXACT Flickr URL. If it asks you for a description, you can leave it blank.

Method 3: Linking to a Gallery at Flickr
See ‘Photos’ below:

POEMS AND AUDIO
There does not seem to be an equivalent yet of YouTube/Flickr for audio, maybe due to copyright issues. You can embed media players into a web page to give an audio streaming experience, but its not that straightforward. The best method for now is to upload an MP3 and simply link to it as follows:

  1. Upload the mp3 file using the dialog on the bottom of the Write Post or Write Page pages. You don’t have to create a page to upload a file.
  2. Then, in any page or post, write an anchor tag that links to the file. (replace the [’s and ]’s with <'s and >’s) eg [A href=”uploads/myfile.mp3″]My Latest Poem[/A]. Be careful to match the exact path, capitalisation and file extension. Note that you can use the file browser on the bottom of the page, and by clicking on the file, it will ‘Send It (The Anchor tage) to the editor. However it gets the path wrong so you might want to do this step by hand as described herein.
  3. Then, when a user want to play the poem, they simply click on the link. They will be offered the option to Save or to Download. Either way, the file will automatically boot up the media player on their machine (either Windows Media Player, RealAudio or Quicktime) and play the poem.

PHOTOS
To do Photos, you can use the methods described in Poems to embed one-off photos in a blog post.

  1. Find the photo on Flickr, the exact one in the exact size you are interested in.
  2. Right Mouse Click on the mage. Go ‘Copy Image Location’ in Firefox, and that copies the URL of the exact image you are viewing to the clipboard.
  3. Back in your post editor, click the [img] button on the editor bar.
  4. In the URL, just paste the EXACT Flickr URL. If it asks you for a description, you can leave it blank.

This way enables you to link to one off photos, either uploaded to your Blog or on Flickr.

Alternatively, you can create entire galleries, linking to Flickr. To do this you need to use the FAlbum plugi, which embeds PHP code in your Blog page. The plugin to do the PHP is called Exec-PHP, but you don’t need to know this. PHP code is always embedded like this <*php blah blah blah *>. In reality, to run the code, instead of astersiks you have question marks, that style will ontinue in the comments below.

There is more documentation on FAlbum here.

When your are embedding calls to FAlbum in your page, you have to put one initialising call in before you make the album calls, like this: <*php global $falbum; *>.

To do a mini gallery of random photos
Generic Syntax: <*php $falbum→show_random($numbertoshow, $tag(s), $style, $size) *>
$tag(s) are optional (example ‘landscape’ or ‘landscape model’)
$style = 0 or 1 or omitted
$size = ‘SQ’, ‘T’, ‘S’, ‘M’ , ‘L’, or ‘O’, or omitted
Example: <*php $falbum→show_random(3) *>, so in your post you might have embedded PHP code like this:
<*php global $falbum; *>
<*php $falbum->show_random(3) *>
Example 2: <*php $falbum→show_random(3,'landscape','landscape',0,'SQ') *>

If you click on a photo in a mini-gallery, that takes you in effect to a kind of crude slideshow of everything covered by the tags you specified.

To show Recent Photos
The code is:
<*php $falbum→show_recent($numbertoshow, $style, $size) *>

Limitations of FlickR/FAlbum: There isn’t a really neat way to embed a single image - FAlbum does the complicated things, not the easy ones. You can easily simply put the FlickR image in an tage, as shown above.

VIDEOS
Videos are surprisingly simple.

To post videos from You Tube

  1. Find the ID of the video at YouTube (its in the URL). eg: XcidD2HFK8M.
  2. Embed the following tag in your page, with the number of your video (replace the round brackets by square brackets). (gv data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/XcidD2HFK8M”)(/gv)


CHANGING THE APPEARANCE

The top banner for the Blog is in your Uploads directory, called top.jpg. You can change it, but keep its size the same and save it as jpg.

The font colours etc are in the stylesheet styles.css, which you can edit from WordPress under Manage/Files, but be very careful.