With the Beginners Blog Help page getting rather long, I decided to break out another page for those members wishing to write and publish their own posts. You can only do this by having your user level upgraded so if you’d like to do that, email me and I’ll set you up.

Once you’re ready to write, here’s what you need to know.

Information for Authors (those who can write posts)

Every member of the Walkah-Blog has a user level. The lowest is “0″ and allows you to post comments, use the chat box, and edit your user profile (password, username etc.) The highest is “10″ which allows me to control the whole she-bang. If you wish to write posts, I will upgrade you to user level 2.

User level 2 can write posts, publish posts to the site, and save posts for future publication. You can also upload images from your computer to the site for placement in posts! As a level 2 user you will notice that when you login, you now have more choices. You should see Dashboard, Write, Manage, User, and Upload.

Writing a Post

Its just like writing a comment. Just click on “Write” in the admin panel (where you go to when you log in). It should give you a page that looks something like this:

From here just fill in your Title and write your post in the larger text area. Its about as easy at email. There are two additional thing to know though. First, you’ll need to pick a category to post under. This is the category that your post will be archived by. Usually it will be your own category (ie. Pat’s Corner, Ryan’s Blog, etc). Just check it and make sure no other category is checked. Second, because the site is in html, if you want to add bold text, italic text, links or images, you’ll need to use Tags.

When you’re done with your post, either click Publish to put it on the blog, or click Save it to post it later. You have two options for saving. One is to save as draft, the other is to save as private. If you save as draft, other authors will be able to see it on the control panel. Saving as private keeps it so that only you can see the post.

Using Tags

Tags are part of html’s software code. Tags tell your browser how to interpret text. For instance, to display italic, tags have to bracket the word italics to tell your browser to display the word in italics. Tags are code words or abbreviations inside of carets. The tag for italics for example is < e m >. Tags need to be closed so the browser knows when to stop the code so while < e m > is in front of the word italics, < / e m > has to be right after it to keep the rest of the words after it from being in italics.

Fortunately, you don’t have to remember all this because there are buttons above the text box to use as shortcuts. To use one, just click on it, type the text you want in bold or italics, and then click it again (this time it should have a / before it) to close the tags.

Alternatively, if you’ve already typed the text, select it with your cursor, then click the tag button. It will insert both tags automatically so there’s no need to click the tag button again.

To insert a link, just click the link button. A box will open asking for the link. Type or paste in the link and click okay. Now you’ll be asked for what text you would like displayed in the post. For example, if you were pointing to Google, the link would look like this: http://www.google.com but the text you would want displayed would be Google. So, when people click on the word Google in your post, it takes them to that site.

Using Images and Image Tags

Images are just a touch more involved. Displaying an image in your post will take two steps. Uploading the image and then inserting it into your post.

First, upload the image. Its best to do this before you start typing because once you click the Upload link, you’ll lose whatever you typed. So either save your draft or upload before you start. Click on Upload. Click on Browse to find the file on your computer. Find the file and click open. Now type in the name for the photo. Keep No Thumbnail checked and then click Upload File.

You should then get a page that says something like this:

File uploaded!

Your file yourimage.jpg was uploaded successfully!

Here’s the code to display it:

img src='http://www.tomandjaime.com/blog/wp-content/yourimage.jpg' alt='' /

Image Details:
Name: yourimage.jpg
Size:59.83 KB
Type:image/jpeg

Copy the line under Here’s the Code to display it. Now, go back to your post, and paste that line in wherever you’d like to display your image.

One caveat, the width of the text column on the blog is only 450 pixels. Images placed in posts should only be 72 dpi and 450 pixels wide. If its larger, then you need to alter it. There’s a pretty simple fix. You simply insert the size you want into the code. If the picture is wider than it is tall, the new width should be 450 and the height should be 338. If the picture is taller than it is wide, the new width should be 450 and the height should be 600. The code looks like this:

width=450 height=338 or width=450 height=600. You insert that between “img” and “src”. So the final code would look like:

img width=450 height=338 src='http://www.tomandjaime.com/blog/wp-content/yourimage.jpg' alt='' /

It seems pretty complicated if you haven’t done it before but its really not so bad. If this scares the crap out of you, just email or call me and I’ll walk you through it