Refresher Course On Formatting Posts And Post Images

I know everyone is sick of meta, but…

It’s very important that any image included at the top of your post is properly formatted. Otherwise it won’t show up properly as a thumbnail down below, and could possibly throw off the formatting of other posts near it.

It’s also important that “more” tags are placed after one or two lines or short paragraphs on all posts. This is because I’m shooting for a sort of uniformity on the front page that brings a particular aesthetic to the site. In order for it to work, everyone has to play along.

As always, any questions or help can be directed to me and I will try to get to it. I was on vacation last week so I was pretty much out of touch, but I tried to drop by and do little fixes.

So, in a nutshell, here’s how you insert a picture now:

How To Insert An Image At The Top Of Your Post

All images must be uploaded to the site. We cannot hotlink from other sites like Flickr for images at the top of posts. You can do whatever you like for images further down, but for the one image that shows up on the front page, you need to upload to the site.

When you upload you will see this:

Notice the Link URL I have circled. This is the important part. Copy this right away. Do not click “Insert into Post.”

If you insert into post this throws everything off. Simply copy that URL and then close the window.

Next you need to scroll down a tiny bit below the place where you write your post and you’ll see a box called Post Image, that looks like this:

All you need to do is insert the link you just copied into that box and you’re done. The only time you will change anything is if you want to insert a larger image and center it at the top of the post (as opposed to a smaller image that sits to the left of the post.) Then you’ll need to change the settings just below the Post Image box you just copied into.

Image Sizes

When you download an image, prior to uploading it to the site you should use a program like Paint (or an online service like Pixlr) to change the size of the image. For images that sit to the left, this should be approximately 300 pixels. For images that sit at the top and are centered this should be approximately 600 pixels (and no larger than 640 pixels.) Again, this should be done prior to uploading.

If you want to caption an image or credit an image please do so at the bottom of your post as this formatting style does not allow captions below the image itself.

Insert “More” Tag

To keep the front page neat and tidy, all posts should be cut off with “more” tags pretty quickly. The sooner the better. As a rule of thumb, your text shouldn’t go much further down the page than the image included with your post.

Insert Galleries

Another fun thing you can do with a post is insert galleries. Simply upload all the photos you want included and rather than inserting each one individually, you can just click “Insert Gallery” wherever you want in the post and your photos will show up as nice little thumbnails. When clicked on, these thumbnails will pop off the page, like so:

Any other questions please don’t hesitate to ask. I’m sorry this has been a pain in the ass for many of you. Once you get the hang of it all it’s surprisingly easy. Just be sure that whenever you’re inserting an image, that it’s an image file and ends in .jpg or .png or something like that (and is not an attachment or link to a post, etc.)

Thanks for bearing with me, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

P.S. I’m also not getting comments to my email. No idea what’s going on…will try to fix.