GCBlog tutorial
- Login to your blog
- Creating a blog entry, with a photo
- Adding photos to or editing an existing blog entry
- "Meta" information about your blog entries (templates)
Login to your blog
To login to your blog, remember (or bookmark) this URL:
You'll be asked for your username and password. Use the same ones that you'd use for e-mail. (The login is secure so you can visit this URL from off-campus without risking your password.)
If you've already registered your blog, you'll land on the "new entry" screen (see below).
Creating a blog entry, with a photo
The steps to creating a blog entry are:
- Writing the text.
- Uploading one (or more) photos:
- Selecting the photo to upload.
- Tweaking the uploaded photo.
- Selecting the thumbnail.
Going through these one at a time with screenshots:
- Writing the text.
Once you've logged in, if you're not already on the "new entry" screen, click on that. You'll see a form like this that you can fill out with the text of your entry.
Fill in the fields.
The URL is optional. If you do type in a URL, it should begin with "http://...".
Make sure you select the category for your blog entry before you hit the post new entry button.
- Uploading one (or more) photos:
After you've posted your new entry, you'll see this screen.
To add a photo to your entry, choose upload a new image.
- Selecting the photo to upload.
The image upload window will pop open. Click on "Browse"
...and go out and select the jpg image you wish to upload. (Gif images are not currently supported. But all digital cameras these days save their images in the jpg format). It may be on the hard drive of your computer. Or, it may be that your camera's memory shows up as if it were some other drive connected to the computer.
Once you've selected the image to upload, click "upload image"
The image that you upload can be any size. In the process of uploading it will be cut down to some maximum size (currently no higher or wider than 550 pixels) for you. If you're uploading images from a slow Internet connection from off-campus, you can cut your images down beforehand to a maximum dimension of 550 pixels to save time on uploading. But this is not necessary.
Images are also sharpened lightly in the process of uploading.
- Tweaking the uploaded photo.
It may take a while from off-campus, but once the image arrives at the Goshen College webserver, the screen looks like this:
You can use the brightness controls to lighten/darken the image:
This particular image is too dark. Clicking on one of the lighter bars to the right will lighten the whole image:
The changes to the photo should happen relatively 'fast', since they are happening on the GC webserver, not on your computer. So you can change the brightness even if you have a slow Internet connection without having to wait for your image to upload a second time.
You can also rotate the image by 90 degrees by clicking on one of the two rotation controls, in case you twisted your camera around to snap a picture in portrait mode:
When you're finished tweaking your image, click "thumbnail selection".
- Selecting the thumbnail.
You'll see the following screen. Click on the small picture which best represents what the big picture is all about, or has some particular person or detail that you'd like to focus attention on.
The screen will shortly look like this:
If this is the first time you've done this, congratulation, you're done!
- Selecting the photo to upload.
At this point there are several different things you could do:
- You could go see what your blog looks like.
- You could add another image to this blog entry, just click "upload
an image" to get started with a second image.
- You could edit the text of your entry. Click "[Edit text]", and make sure you hit "post new entry" to save the changes you make.
Adding photos to, or editing an existing blog entry
You can add photos to an existing blog entry. The potentially confusing part is that you must get there by means of 'editing' the text of a blog entry first. Here's how it works:
First choose the entry:
Click on "edit entries/categories"
Click on the category that has the entry you want to edit (in this case "sstphotos"),
and then, click "edit" beside the entry you want
to change (or add photos to):
Make any changes to the text (or don't bother) and click "post
new entry":
Now at this point, you can press the "upload an image"
button to add more pictures to your blog entry.
Adding Captions
To add a caption, start by choosing edit entries/categories and then choose which sub-blog (category) you want to edit.
Choose edit/move beside the entry you want to modify.
On the next screen, choose the captions link.
You'll be able to add captions to any/all images.
It's fine to add captions to just the images that need a bit of extra explanation. If you add a caption to one image don't feel that you *must* add captions to absolutely all the other images in that entry.
"Meta" information
Maybe you'd like to keep (and eventually display) more info about a particular blog entry...say, who the photographer is for a particular entry? There's a kind of free-form way to do this.
Storing meta information
When you create a new entry, you'll also see a label for editing meta information.
Click [edit] to edit the meta info (and show any existing meta information)
Each line of meta information contains...
- A tag or label - this is a single word (case sensitive) with no spaces...
- the separator "::"
- the value of the meta tag
You can invent meta tags, and call them whatever you want. Here for example are two, indicating who took the pictures, and the actual date of what was blogged about (as opposed to the automatically-generated date when the blog was entered into the system...)
If you can't remember the format of the meta tags, just click "Overwrite" to get some examples filled in for you.
When you click "Post new entry" you'll also save your meta information.
Displaying the meta information on your blog entries
To show the meta information, you'll need to add some tags to your page templates. Go to "edit entries/categories", select your category, click "Edit page templates".
You can insert your meta info into either (or both) the text layout or image layout parts of your page templates. Whatever you type between {% ... %} will be filled in and displayed *if* that meta tag (prefacced by "::") is set for a particular entry. If it's not set, the whole {% ... %} piece disappears.
After you "save and apply template edits" as in the screenshot above, the blog entry would look like:
If the photographer meta tag is not set for a particular entry, then none of the markup between {% ... %} will show up on the blog entry.
