At Aileen’s prompting I’ve started to do some work to facilitate people posting image / design based blogs. Although they are a little complex we actually have a relatively sophesticated set of wools for doing this in the form of Image Picker and FCK Editor (which provides the WYSIWYG / word style interface). There are some quick instructions on using these below
At Aileen’s prompting I’ve started to do some work to facilitate people posting image / design based blogs. Although they are a little complex we actually have a relatively sophesticated set of wools for doing this in the form of Image Picker and FCK Editor (which provides the WYSIWYG / word style interface). There are some quick instructions on using these below
One thing to watch is that each account has a limit to the total file size it can upload. This is fairly bit but to avoid hitting it don’t post huge uncompressed images. If you want to use such images post them to something like flickr, get the URL for them and use the image placeholder in FCK edit that is described below. This is very powerful.
1. When posting images don’t use the attach file which doesn’t display the image in the post.
a. If the image is already online use the image placeholder in the WYSIWYG editor (the line of symbols above body field). Its the little picture of mountains and includes a load of simple but powerful placement tolls that enable you to tell the text to flow around the image.
b. If its not online already use ‘Image Picker’ to upload it. It’s a little complex as you need to upload the image and then click on ‘Switch to plain text editor‘ before clicking on where you want the image to go and then clicking ‘insert image’. Play around with it and you’ll work it out. You can upload up to mb of images which is loads providing you make them smallish and compress them. Your also able to browse images you have already uploaded allowing you to reuse images or use them as a thumbnail for the teaser ad in full size in the body of the article.
2. Try and make you title description rather than general as not only will the title be what catches peoples eye it is also used to generate the URL. A title that contains descriptive words will therefore attract hits via relevant searches in google.
3. In terms of the text what you be interesting is to say a line or two about why you’ve done a particular image and what the components mean to you. I reckon if you have a few design bloggers active that could get some good back and forth as you can comment on each others blogs.
4. Image picker will generate thumbnails for you linked to the larger image. If you put this at the top of the input box it appears in the teaser view.
5. You should tag design articles with ‘Anarchsit Design’ in the article tag box. If you start to type anarchist then a drop down menu with ‘Anarchist Design’ will appear, its better to select this rather than complete the typing as this eliminates the danger of spelling it wrong / differently
Read the how to publish articles topic and expereiment with all of the above, I’ll tidy up anything that goes wrong.