Monday, May 10, 2004

Testing Comments 

We are testing the new Blogger commenting system. This is only a test.

Wednesday, December 24, 2003

How To Give The Last-Minute Gift of Blog 

A nice tutorial on getting started (or getting someone else started) with Blogger, here.

Thursday, December 04, 2003

Mucking about 

Performance was apparently slowed by the flooble chatterbox so I have removed it. I've also changed the appearance around.

Sunday, November 30, 2003

Chatterbox 

Added a flooble chatterbox to the side bar for immediate chatter, shouting, blabbering and so on. Now comments can be semi-permanent and associated with a particular post by clicking "comments" under a post, or temporary and not associated with a particular post by using the chatterbox.

Saturday, November 29, 2003

Comments 

I have added comments functionality to this blog using the free comment system from Blog Speak. Free is good. To comment on or ask questions about any post or to read the existing comments just click the highlighted "comments" below it. The number in parenthesis following "comments" is the number of existing comments for that post. I have not used Blog Speak before, so this is an experiment; we'll see how it goes.

For the Blogger help on adding comments to your blog see this.

Manipulating Pictures 

Camera and other images can be 1 mb or more. This is much too big to post on a website. They will take too long to download and use up a lot of web server disk quota.

To reduce their size use the software that came with your camera or computer. If you need software to do this, try the free JPEG Resizer utility here.

You can reduce the file size by reducing the image size and/or increasing the compression (reducing the quality). Once the file is small enough use Upload file to place it in the images directory on your web server. Using an images directory for all of your images is not required but it is a useful and common technique.

Using FTP to Create Directories 

I've added a link at the left to a session that illustrates using a simple command line FTP client like the one that comes with Windows to create directories on your web server. This can be useful because Blogger will not create directories on your web server. But, once you create them, then Blogger can post or upload files to any directory. Here is the sample session.

Using a picture or image in a post 

From the Blogger New Post screen, click upload file. Browse to the image on your computer. For the upload path I entered "images/" (without the quotation marks). This puts the file in the images directory on your server - a good idea.

Now a link to the image would look like this: Tankits.jpg.
And, the image in line would look like this: .
The Blogger help on uploading images is here.

Multiple Members 

While logged in as Stephen, I added myself as a member of this blog. Now, when I make a post it will be signed by me, assuming that I logged in as me. That gives me access to this blog only, not all of the blogs on this website. Of course, at the moment, I can still sign in as Stephen and cause (or fix) problems elsewhere.

Blogger knowledgebase help on multiple team members is here.