Correntewire "How To"s
These are the posts that explain “How To” do things on the Correntewire site. This is necessary since this site has many more features than blogger does.
Adding a YouTube video to a post
1. Go to the YouTube video page of your choice.
2. Look for the box to the right of the image
3. Select all the HTML in the second box down (the box labelled “Embed”). If you tab into the box, you’ll be sure of selecting all of the HTML in the box. The HTML you select will start with an <object> tag and end with an </object> tag
4. Start a new post at Corrente.
5. Paste your HTML into the post.
6. Click the “Input Formats” triangle below the post.
7. Select the Full HTML radio button.
8. Press Submit.
The YouTube video should appear.
NOTE: If the YouTube HTML came to you via email, it may be screwed up in various ways (email is notorious for doing this). For example, if the mailer inserts any carriage returns or spaces in the URLs, the browser won’t understand the URLs, and the video won’t appear. It’s probably best to go to a YouTube link and go through the steps above.
Creating An Avatar
[Only contributors will be able to create avatars, but this may be useful to everyone, to show how the site works.]
Lambert asked about creating an avatar, like the one you see next to my name in posts and comments.
What I did was go to “My Accountâ€, and then to “Editâ€. Scroll down to the “Pictureâ€, then click on “Browse†and search your hard drive for an image you’d like. I used the same one I use for my Gravatar. It had to be vastly pared down to fit, and we have software called Picsizer that you can use to do it. Once I (actually my husband) had shrunk it and saved it, I just uploaded it through the “Browse†button, and voila!
Glossary entries can be created
[Only contributors will be able to create glossary entries, but this may be useful to everyone, to show how the site works.]
This is a test of the glossary module. There should be one glossary entry for Duck Pit
. And there should be a second glossary entry for Clusterfuck . There should not be a glossary entry for the second mention of Duck Pit . Neither duck pit nor clusterfuck should be highlighted as glossary items.
NOTE: This post demonstrates the technology. We need to make a decision about what glossary terms to use, since only a single glossary can be used. It may be that another glossary, more conducive to D.I.Y. Research, should be constructed. This would need to be thought through so as not to duplicate existing efforts, e.g., dKosapedia or even WikiPedia.
How to save a post as a draft
I should put this in documentation, I’ll go do that now.
On the Edit page for the post:
1. In the options box, make sure “publish” is NOT checked (nothing else should be checked, but that is the default).
2. Press Submit to save the post.
3. To retrieve the post, click the “Content” link in the sidebar. A page listing all your content will appear, including this draft post. In the status column, your post will be “Not published.”
4. When you want the post to be published, check “publish” and press Submit.
Images can be added to the blog
Drupal has an integrated system for adding and categorizing graphics, but it seems like it’s going to be simpler just to use flickr (or an alternative like photobucket). These are free services that store graphics, and then allow you to place them in posts by using an IMG tag with a URL to the image in the SRC attribute. So what we’re going to do is upload the image, go find the appropriate IMG tag in the HTML code that flickr creates for us, and then paste that tag into the code for our post. There are a lot of steps, but it’s very easy and mechanical.
1. Log in to or create an account atflickr.
2. Click the Choose Photos link.
3. A dialog box for your computer appears. Navigate to the pictures you want to upload — the dialog permits several pictures to be selected — and click Select.
4. A new page appears, listing the photos selected for upload. Click the Upload Photos link.
5. A bar appears to show the progress of the upload. Wait.
6. When Finished! appears, click on Describe your photos. I never bother.
7. Click the Save Batch button at the bottom of the page.
Now let’s grab the HTML code.
8. On the page that appears from step 7, a thumbnail of the image you just uploaded will appear. Click on the thumbnail.
9. A page for that single picture appears. Peer down at the right hand sidebar, and click on the different sizes link.
10. A page with the different sizes of the picture appears: Square, Thumbnail, Small, Medium, Large. Note the dimensions beneath the photos: THE MAXIMUM WIDTH FOR A CORRENTE IMAGE IS 500. Each size is a link.
WARNING: Be sure to use a width, like 500 or 500px, and not a percentage, like 75%, which will mess up page widths in IE6.
11. If the size presented (generally Medium) is not what you want, click on the link to the size that is closest to what you do want (not to exceed 500px).
12. Scroll down to step 1, where you see the following text:
1. Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage:
You will see a text box filled with HTML that looks like the following. (We only want some of the HTML; that is, we don’t want the A tag, which is essentially Flickr marketing cruft, but the IMG tag inside it.
” />
13. Following the example above, copy this:
12. Paste the image into your post. You may wish to add two additional “attributes” (in red, below)”
The “Left” alignment floats the image left and causes the browser to wrap the text around it. The “hspace” (horizontal space) attribute sets the gutter between the graphic and the text; “6px” (pixels) is a reasonable value. Both attributes are needed for wrapping to work. If you get unexpected results, check the spelling of the attribute names, the values (“left”, “right,” “center”), and check that the quotes around the value are present and balanced. NOTE: Straight quotes, not curly quotes!
POSTSCRIPT Aspiring wizards may wish to change image sizes without going through Flickr. Do this by removing the height attribute, if it is present, and changing the value of the width attribute (to a maximum of 500). The site includes a graphics engine that is smart enough to do the resizing in proportion. Note that shrinking the image will not degrade the image quality, but blowing it up may. Note, however, that this technique puts a load on the server, so please use it sparingly for small images.
Polls can be created
[Only contributors and affiliates will be able to create polls, but this may be useful to everyone, to show how the site works.]
1. Click on the Post Other Content link. On the page that comes up, click Poll.
2. The page to create the poll comes up. Most of it works just like a Blog post.
3. Fill in the blanks as appropriate.
Posting to your blog
[Only contributors will be able to create blogs, but this may be useful to everyone, to show how the site works.]
First new feature: posts can be “sticky,” i.e. always appear at the top of the main page (as well as your blog). See here for the feature list of Drupal (the software that runs this site) vs. blogger, and here for the How Tos.
Second new feature: Click “Read more” below to… read more about the 5 steps to posting.
Simple: Five steps to post
If you aren’t logged in, enter your name and password in the login boxes at lower right, then click the login button. Now that you are logged in:
- Look for your name in the right sidebar. Right below it is an orange link reading “Post to my blog.” Click it.
- In the new page that appears, go down to the “Options” box. If you want the first part of your post to appear on the front page (and the rest in your blog) check the box that says “Promoted to front page.” If you want your post to be sticky (like this blue ruled box at the top of the main page), check “Sticky at top of lists.”
- Go down to the “Title” box and enter a title.
- Go down to the “Body” box and enter the main part of your post, making sure it’s at least 10 characters long. For now, just use text with two returns between each para.
- Scroll past everything else and press Submit.
Your new post will appear on a new page. There will be tabs at the top of the page. If you wish to edit your post, or experiment with new features, click the “Edit” tab.
Only you (and other contributors and administrators) will be able to edit your post. Everyone will be able to read it. Everyone except for unregistered users will be enabled to comment upon it.
Other forms of content have their own text entry boxes but work like this one.
Detailed: All the options and what they mean
The editing/creating box is more powerful than blogger but necessarily more complex. However, the defaults are reasonable so you can leave most of the controls alone.
There are three tabs: View/Edit/Outline. I’ll talk about Edit for now, and start at the top of the boxes and work downward. (View should be self-explanatory, and Outline lets you contribute to a book.)
You should be able to click on Edit and see this post text in the edit box, and scroll around the Edit page.
1. There are red “*”s next to the items you have to fill in (like any online form).
2. In the “Authoring information” box, you probably don’t need to change anything. (In fact, I don’t know what happens if you do.)
3. In the “Options” box, you see the options to promote to the front page (the default is that the post stays on your blog page), make sticky (like this post), etc. Since we don’t moderate posts, there’s no need to check that box. (In fact, I don’t know what happens if you do.)
4. “User comments” are enabled by default. (We have set them up so that they do not go right right right until they fall off the page, like Kos.)
5. “Title” As in Blogger, this will become the URL.
6. “View Permissions” means who can read the posts. The defaults enable us (conntributors) and all readers (registered or not) to see everything. (I will explain the various “roles” elsewhere).
7. “View Permissions” means who can write the posts. The default is you, but any contributor or admin can edit anything, regardless of these settings. This is as it should be.
8. “Path alias” is the URL of the post, which is automatically generated from the title. However, unlike blogger, you can give the page a URL of your own (one_word_just_like_this). This is useful if you change the title of the post, but want the title to retain its URL in case others have linked to it.
9. “Departments” is a category (“taxonomy”) term. It allows you to put a post in, for example, “The Department of How Stupid….” All posts in a given category can be seen at once on the page devoted to that taxonomy term. (The term appears in blue on the post and you can click on it.)
10. “Thread”, “Recipes”, “How To” are also categories. A post can be classified into more than one category.
11. “Body” is where you enter the text of the post.
12. “Input format” says what kind of content you can enter in the post. If you want to do what you’ve been doing in Blogger, use “Filtered HTML” and use only the HTML tags listed there. (NOTE: If there are HTML tags you don’t see listed that you want to use, they can be added.) Full HTML means what it says. If you don’t know what PHP means, don’t use that input format.
13. “Add images” (green plus sign) lets you add HTML code that pulls in an image, stored on our side, into the post. (I’ll write up a separate post on this.)
14. “Sidebar” Allows you to add a small box at the top (for an epigraph or a picture or useful links. See here for demo.
15. You have Preview, Submit, Delete buttons. You may submit without previewing, but if you are previewing, do not forget to submit; you may lose your post if you don’t submit!
Special characters are created automatically
This is a test of the smarty pants module.
Two dashes—should turn into an em-dash
I’ve always wanted typographers quotes.
“Double quotes, too!”
Splitting a post between front page and blog
[Only contributors will be able to post, but this may be useful to everyone, to show how the site works.]
To control where your post gets split. Use an HTML comment that looks like:
<!—break—>
but is really this:
[Contributors, click the edit tab so you can see what the HTML comment looks like.]