Blogging for Beginners

Learn how to link in your posts...

One of the best attributes of a good blog post is its links to background information or supporting documents. It is one thing to state fact or opinion on a subject, and another alltogether to provide some means for your reader to explore the subject on their own and come to their own conclusions. This is one of the key differences between "blog" reporting and mainstream media reporting. Most bloggers love to reveal their sources...

So how do you make a link in your post to another location? All you need to know is the most basic of html tags and the destination URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the page you wish to link to.

Lets say I wanted to create a link to Paschal Baute's home page. I know the URL is http://www.paschalbaute.com, and I include the http:// too. That is the part that takes it from just being a description of the address to being an actual, well formed web address.

Most blog interfaces contain a toolbar button for links. To use that button, simply highlight the term in your post you wish the reader to click on, and then click the toolbar button. A small dialog will pop-up will appear and will contain the text that you highlighted, and a blank space for the URL. Copy and paste the URL into the space provided and hit the ok or save button. Depending on the view of your work that you currently have, HTML or WYSIWYG, you will see the link applied to the text.

Doing so manually, is just as easy. Before the text you want to be the link, add this html tag to your post.

but replace my URL with the page you want the vistor to go to.

At the end of the text, close the html tag like this:

So the end result looks like this:

Paschal's Home Page

When you post, the html will be rendered as part of the web page and all you and your vistors will see is this.

Paschal's Home Page

Copy/Paste problems

Have you ever selected a bunch of text from a web page because you wanted to email it or add it to a document, or perhaps even add it as a quote to your own blog? What happened when you pasted it? Did you get pictures too, or tables and lines where you just wanted text? Did it take a long time to finally paste? If all of this sounds familiar, then you are probably a Windows user that copied text out of Internet Explorer.
A quick explanation of how the Windows operating system works first, then I'll tell you how to avoid this annoyance in the future. One of the early conventions in Windows was a Microsoft convention known as OLE - Object Linking & Embedding. This was a cross-application feature that allowed you to drag little Excel spreadsheets into your Word documents, or to put a graph you created in Visio into your Powerpoint presentation. During the process, a certain amount of data, and instructions about how to display that data is wrapped up into an "object" The final result is that "object" embedding into another "object", like your presentation in Powerpoint. The power of this technique was that if the data that was used to create the graph in Excel ever changed, the graph that you had already inserted (embedded) elsewhere would automatically "update" itself because it was "linked" to the original data. Hence, Object Linking and Embedding, (OLE).
Today, when you highlight a section of text on a web page in IE, this same process, which is now an inherent part of the Windows Operating System, creates an Object, along with the rules about how to display it, and copies it to your clipboard. When you paste that object into your listserve post, or your blog page, or your word document, the object, its HTML and its display instructions all go with. Its a lot of data, which is why it sometimes takes a little longer that when you simply copy and paste text.
If you do a lot of this, say you are an avid poster to list-serves or you are a frequent blogger, there is a simple solution. Get Firefox. Firefox is an alternative browser from the Mozilla foundation, an open source group that thinks you can do better than IE. And you can. There are many reasons to stop using Internet Explorer, which I won't list in this post. The reason you should switch if you fall into the category of web user that I described above, is because of an extension to Firefox that you can't get with IE.
What is an extension? It is an add-on. An enhancement. It is a little bit of code that adds itself into the Firefox program you initially downloaded and installed, and it makes it better. The extension I am talking about here is called the copy-plain-text extension. Once you have Firefox, you can download and install this extension, and here is what it gives you.
You want to use some text in a post you are writing, but the web page you found it on is cluttered with tables and lines and images. You select and highlight the text, but there is an image in the selection too - take a deep breath, right click on your selection. In the menu you will see an option called 'copy as plain text' - thanks to the browser extension you have. When you select this option, it removes the HTML, the image, and any display instructions associated with any objects and copies just the text to your clipboard, so you can paste just the text anywhere you want. I should mention that one additional thing it does can be kind of confusing. If you hold your mouse over some images, and a little box appears that has text in it, this text will also be included in what you copy and paste. Its not the image, its the text describing the image, and it is easily deleted if you don't want it.
This is a speedy way to get just the plain text off a page and into your post. Here are the tools you need to do it.

The Firefox browser can be obtained here.

After you have that installed, open this address and get the extension.

You'll have to close your browser and re-start it to see the option in your right click menu.

There are hundreds of extensions available at the site listed above. Some of them do things that I don't understand or have a need for - but there are some that add ease of use and additional functionality to the browser that will make you wonder how you got along without them. Check it out.

Media rich blogs at Lightning Speed

Check out bubbler.com, a free public beta of a media rich blog host. It's only free during the beta, mind you, after that it will cost $4.99 a month. What is media-rich? From what I gathered from their site, it means you can drag and drop pictures, movies, sounds, spreadsheets, Word documents, whatever you want onto your blog page and it gets published.

One of the biggest differences between this blog host and others is that bubbler requires you to download an executable program that runs on your computer. It looks to me like a Macromedia Flash based program (hence the ability to drag and drop items onto your blog page). If anyone decides to try this one out, I would love to hear some feedback on it. I may give it a shot from home this weekend. As long as its free, it works for me.

Bloggers narrowly dodge federal crackdown

Bloggers narrowly dodge federal crackdown

A March 10 draft of a document created by the Federal Elections commission would have required you political bloggers out there "to comply with the entirety of the regulations that apply to paid political advertising on television, radio and broadcast."

More than you bargained for? The bloggers have mobilized, and are gaining support.

I support the fact that bloggers, at least in the political arena, should be granted the same exemptions as "conventional" media when it comes to campaign finance reform and politcal reporting. The blogosphere has proven its lack of bias, much to the dismay of corporate media. For every "for" argument on an issue you can find an "against". That's not always true of the mainstream media.

"Bloggers are not subject to corporate constraints or concerns, and have shown their independence over and over. "

What are those funny characters?

Despite the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get.) text editor that most blog hosting interfaces provide, many people choose to create their posts in their favorite Word Processor first. I have heard that it is because Word offers spelling and grammar checks, or because people have “lost” posts due to a web page malfunction. Well, here is my take on word processors – You have seen what food processors do to food, right?

I typed the paragraph above into Microsoft Word, then cut and pasted it into the interface provided after I logged into my Blogger.com account. A quick check with the preview funtion revealed that the funny characters I refer to in the title are not there.

Here is an example – sometimes the hyphen – when you create it with Microsoft Word, you use the minus key. Word is smart enough to figure out from the context whether you wanted a hyphen or you really wanted the minus sign. Unfortunately, some versions of Word, mine excluded apparently, use a character-encoding that is not alltogether web friendly. When you paste from one application into another, such as from Word to a web-based interface, the character encodings may not be compatible.

Two solutions: 1) Use the editor provided by your blog host. If it is a long post and you fear losing it, click the save as draft button often. Most mature blog hosts provide everything you need, including spell check, right in their application. 2) Copy your post into a simple text program like Notepad. Almost all Operating Systems come with a basic text editor. If your post looks normal there, copy it again and paste it into the interface provided by your blog and publish it.

If you still see crazy characters in the final result, edit your post and look for possible offendees like the single and double "Smart Quotes" or foriegn language characters like the ñ.

See how easy it is? I didn't even read the direc...

See how easy it is? I didn't even read the directions! This morning I downloaded Picasa and Hello, both free programs. Without reading any directions, I selected the picture you see above from the Picasa workspace, and clicked on the Blogger button. That opened Hello. Hello had the picture pre-loaded into it's workspace, and it asked me to login to my blogger account (it uses the blogger.com webpage login, so it was familiar). Still not having read any directions, I choose the correct blog (this one) and hit the publish button. That was it. I went and looked at my blog page and there was the picture and the caption that I had typed in using Hello. (I edited this text after the picture had been posted.) Absolutely ANYONE can do this!

Blogging Glossary (WikiPedia)

These are some terms that new Bloggers will become familiar with. Links within are from Wikipedia...a free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Read it here.

Oh, another cool thing!

Since I just got done talking about Google and how they integrated Picasa with Blogger, I should mention that the Google email service, Gmail. also integrates with Picasa. Gmail will create thumnails of your images in your emails when you send pictures to friends and family. No more ugly little document icons with the paperclip...I mean really, who ever bought the digital paper clip metaphor for "attachments" anyway?

Gmail is great, and it has replaced my Hotmail (MSN) account for personal use. You get 1000MB of space, so feasibly you never have to delete an email. I have 21MB currently, about 2%. Gmail lets you apply labels to organize your messages, or you can enter a search word and get all your emails that have that word in them. Kind of like Googling your inbox, if you know what I mean.

If you would like to try Gmail, and perhaps its interface with Picasa, email me here and I will send you an invitation to Gmail. (Its very elite, you need to be invited to use it. :P )

Alan

Pictures in your blog?

In case you were wondering, and you should wonder once in awhile, blogs aren't all about text. Although the primary use of most blog pages is for the written word, and it is an excellent tool for that purpose, the mere fact that a blog is also a web page means it can support images as well.

I won't go into the details of picture blogs or audio blogs at this point, but keep them in mind for future topics I will post here, but the web is multimedia. Its orgins were in academic text, but as they say, "You've come a long way, baby."

But this site is called Blogging for Beginners, right? Right. And Blogger.com (owned now by Google, in case you didn't know that) has some new built in features that make it easy for even beginning bloggers to include pictures in their posts. They do so via a combonation of tools also provided by Google.

Picasa is a photo management program you can download, and let me tell you, even without its hooks into the Blogger system, its well worth the price. (Free!)

Picasa will find all your pictures on your computer for you, and does a pretty good job of organizing them. Some simple settings and you can tell it to only look in the My Pictures folder, or you can set it to catalog every picture that winds up on your hard drive. (Careful here, in most cases every picture you view on a website ends up stored on your hard drive as well, so I think you know where I am going here.)

Here is where Picasa, a service called "Hello" and Blogger work together, I won't re-write all the details here. Read about it on this page. To get straight to the point though, if you install Picasa and let it catalog your pictures, there is going to be a button in there that says post to Blogger. You select the pictures you want to post and hit go! Of course there are probably a couple settings in there, and I haven't tried it yet. (I am a geek, I know how to put images in my posts already. :)

I'll write more as I get a chance to try it out...

Alan