Newbies guide to blogging (Part Two)

Everybody’s doing it. Blogging’s the thing these days, and you don’t need to be a computer geek to make it happen. In this article I show you how to add photos to a blog post. [First published October 2006. Some details may be a bit dated.]

This post continues from Newbies guide to blogging (Part One).

Add a photo

Now you have the basics down, it’s time to add some sophistication. One thing people often want to do is to add photos. There are two main ways to do this:

1. Add one or more photos directly into a post. Mac users see: Newbies Guide to iPhoto for some help on preparing photos.
2. Upload photos to a Flickr account and post to your blog from Flickr. That may be the best option, but details will have to wait for another article.

Tip: Photos you upload to WordPress.com must be less than 1500Kb in size. If you have a high resolution camera you need to find a way to reduce the file size before you can upload a photo. You can avoid this problem by using the Photo sharing service, Flickr.

To add photos directly to a post

To add photos directly to a post, write a post as usual and then scroll down the page to the Upload form. Click the Browse… button to choose a photo from the computer you’re using to write the post.

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Screenshot 6: Browse on your computer for a photo.
Screenshot 7: Add a Title and description and click the Upload button.

Once the photo has been uploaded click on it once to reveal a list of options. Click on an option to change it. Choices should include:

• Using Thumbnail or Using Original
• Not Linked or Linked to Image or Linked to Page

I suggest you choose Using Thumbnail and Linked to Image, but you should experiment with the other options too. After making a selection click on the Send to editor option. The picture is added in to the post. If it goes into the wrong place just drag it into the place where you want it to appear. Now click the Save button (if you’ve already published your post) or the Publish button to make the post live.

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Screenshot 8: Click on a photo in the Browse area to choose options for how to use it in the post.
Screenshot 9: Clicking on the photo in the live post may either bring up a larger version or lead to a page with a full size version, depending on what options you chose.

View your blog

At the top of any Dashboard page is a link called View Site. Click that link to view your blog. After you’ve added posts always view your blog to check that everything is going along as you expect.

Part Three tells you how to make posts private and suggests practising before you leave home.

Whether you’re a computer geek or not, you will also find the recently published book, WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide (affiliate link), extremely useful. In 304 pages it provides simple step by step instructions, with plenty of screenshots, for both the free WordPress.com blogging service and for anyone who wants to set up a WordPress blog on their own web server. The book was written by Maria Langer, author of more than 60 books for Mac users, and Miraz Jordan, writer. ISBN: 0-321-45019-1.

This article includes Windows screenshots (made on a Mac running Parallels software). This article was first published in Macguide magazine Issue #29 September / October 2006 and may have been modified from the original.

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