2 - Using Your Blog
Once you have set up your blog (check here for instructions on how to do this) then you can start editing your blog entries. The first blog entry has been added already. You can edit or delete this entry as you wish but, if you leave it, then it will remain in your blog.
To write a blog entry, click on one of the Add or Edit a blog entry links and that will take you to the main Blog Admin page. The top menu bar changes when you are on this page to include a series of menus that you can use to edit and customise your blog. The Write or Manage links in the menu bar take you to the main blog editing page.
NOTE: The blog software used on the Rockfax site works significantly better with Firefox than any other browser. Other browsers like Safari and older versions of MSIE don’t offer WYSIWYG editing. You can get Firefox here.
To edit your blog type, or paste, your text into the top box and use the lower boxes to upload photos. The top box has some basic layout buttons, like bold, italic, strikethough,
- bullet list
- number list
Left align
Centre align
Right align
and hotlinks to other web sites - here’s how to do this.
You can also edit the date stamp of your blog entry by selecting the Post Timestamp option on the right-hand side bar. This can be useful if you wish to make several blog entries at once about events that occurred on different days.
Photos should be saved in Jpeg format, around 600 pixels on the longest dimension and a resolution of about 72 pixels/inch.
Once you have uploaded a photo you can insert the photo into your blog using the ‘insert into post’ button. A Thumbnail will insert a small version of the image, Full size will insert the full photo, and Title will insert a link to the photo. To refine the look of your blog you can right or left align your photos by selecting the image, and using the align buttons (not visible in all browsers - see Firefox note above). This will allow the text to wrap around the photo. If you find that clicking the align buttons only seems to align the text, then make sure you have selected the photo so that its handles appear.
To resize a photo once you have inserted it into your blog, click the photo so that a higlihted box appears around it. Grab one of the corners and re-size it while holding shift to create a smaller image. DON’T increase the size of the image since this will result in a poor image quality.
When you have finished editing your blog click Save, or click Publish if you wish to make your blog public straight away. Once you click Publish, your blog will be visible to everyone so check that you are happy with it first. You can view it by clicking on the My Blog link. You can also edit it, delete it and add images to it at a later date.
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