1L South Parade

This page is where I am going to put information which is useful to me and others about blogging (especially blogging at Edublogs).

Pictures – take them at the size 480 high x 640 wide by setting your camera to this picture quality setting. This quality is fine for viewing in posts and works well with all the themes I have tested. Uploading images larger than this will mess up the formatting of your pages in some web browsers, but not all. You might not see the results on your computer, especially if you have a newer one running at a higher screen resolution and using the most up-to date software. ALWAYS THINK ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE! I test my blog on my newer computer and then my older Mac. The Mac is about 5 years old and has a lower screen definition of 1024 x 768. You could be really nice and make sure your blog looks good on even older machines that have a screen resolution of 800 x 600, but that might be taking things a bit too far!

If you want people to be able to view or print pictures at a higher resolution, then you need to do one of two things; set up a picture storage account (such as Flickr), or upload a large resolution picture and re-size in the post.

Flickr – I am currently trying this method. Sign up for a free Flickr account and then you can upload and store pictures for people to see on-line. Put the link in your Blogroll (a list of Internet site links that you think people will find useful). You can make sets of photographs in your Flickr account which will allow people to find the photos easily. The only downside is that you have an upload limit per month, but for most people this will be sufficient.

Re-sizing photographs – You can re-size photographs on your posts, whilst retaining the original size upload (people visiting will see a small picture, and if they want to see it larger they can click on the picture to open it in a new page). I have found that the easiest and quickest way is to drag the picture smaller (just a little will do), then go to the “Code” tab. The information about the picture will be displayed along with its current height and width. Simply change the sizes to 480 high x 640 wide. When you get used to doing this it becomes second nature.

File names – Recently I have been investigating a problem with two pictures that Mrs Brown uploaded.  I now think that the problem was the file name.  Mrs Brown had saved the file name with “-” between words, e.g. “tennis-photo.jpg”.  Edublogs software seems to get confused by this and then displays the wrong picture.  To solve the problem, simply remove all punctuation from the file name before uploading, e.g. “tennisphoto.jpg”.