Random Frames

Hey, all! This page is meant for our photo blog’s authors as a “how to” guide to uploading and posting images to the site. Other people are welcome to read on, and maybe get some ideas for running their own cooperative photo weblog, but be warned that only our authors will have the proper access to follow the instructions below.

How the site works We’ve decided to go with a two-pronged attack here, by combining weblog software (WordPress) with image gallery software (Coppermine). Both software packages are easy to use, and while they aren’t specifically designed to work hand-in-hand, this guide will teach you the minimal additional skills you’ll need to use the two together.

Account Creation (One time only) The first step for site authors is to create your accounts for the weblog and gallery sections of the site. Yes, you’ll have to create two accounts, but you can feel free to make your login info the same for both accounts to make things easier to remember. If you have cookies enabled, and your machine is secure (nobody else uses it, or you always log out when you go somewhere), your web browser can remember your login info so that you don’t have to.

For the weblog portion, follow this link. It’s simple - you just enter a username and your e-mail address, and the weblog will e-mail a password to you. When you receive the e-mail, use your username and password to log in. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see your user profile. This is where you can put information about yourself - you can fill in as much or as little as you like.

At the bottom of the form are two blanks labeled “New Password”. You should change your password to what you will remember, instead of the password that was e-mailed to you. Enter your password into both blanks - the two blanks must match, so be careful not to make any typos - and click “Update Profile”.

If you’ve entered your first or last name or a nickname, you can now use the “How to Display Name” box to pick how the weblog will list your name on the posts that you make (just click “Update Profile” again when you’ve made your selection). That’s it for the weblog side. (Note that you won’t be able to do much else here until I grant your account author-level access.)

For the photo gallery portion, follow this link. Agree to the terms (I’ll probably remove that at some point), and the next screen provides you with blanks for your username, a password, and e-mail address. Fill out the form (and provide any optional information in the remaining blanks) and submit your registration. The gallery will send you an e-mail. Follow the instructions in the e-mail, and then click on the “Login” button at the top to log in. That takes care of registration on for the gallery side.

Using the Weblog Whenever you want to make a post to the weblog, it’s pretty easy. Just visit the weblog here:

http://sokar.cwru.edu/photoblog/

If you’re logged in, find the “Site Admin” link at the lower right and click on it. (If you’re not logged in, there’ll be a “Login” link there instead.) You’ll be taken to a screen called the “Dashboard”. Don’t worry about most of this info - it’s all stuff having to do with WordPress and isn’t relevant to you.

At the top, though, is a bar with a bunch of options. One of these is “Write” - if you want to write a new post, click on that. Then, just enter a title and type away! You can use HTML tags in your post if you want, such as if you want to make things boldface or italic. If you forget what the HTML tag for something is, there are quicktag buttons that help you out. Pick the category you want your post to go into, and when you’re done, click “Publish”. Congratulations, you’ve just made a post to the weblog

Using the Gallery Uploading images to the gallery is pretty simple as well, but there’s a little bit of setup involved first. Just visit the gallery here:

http://sokar.cwru.edu/photoblog/photo-access/index.php

If you aren’t logged in, there will be a “Login” button at the top. Click it to log in if necessary.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll see several options toward the top. What we’re interested in at the moment is a place for you to put your images separate from other people’s images.

To do that, we’ll create an album for you. Click the small button “Create/order my albums” in the middle near the top. A large box will show up with “Delete” and “New” buttons below it. Click the “New” button, and “New Album” will appear, highlighted, in the large box. It’ll also appear in the small box below. You can rename that album to whatever you want - suppose you just got back from Topeka, Kansas, and want to post some vacation photos to bore the rest of us. You might name it “Topeka Vacation 2005″, for example. When you’re done naming the album, click “Apply Modifications” to create the album.

Now that you’ve created the album, you can view it. Click “My gallery” at the top left, and a list of all your albums, with a random smattering of images from your gallery, is displayed. If you click on the name of the album you just made, it’ll tell you there aren’t any images. You can fix that by uploading images to the gallery.

To upload, click the “Upload File” button near the top. You’ll get a window with several boxes on it. Some of them have a button labeled “Browse” next to them. These are for sending an image that’s located on your computer. If you click “Browse”, you’ll get a dialog box to let you pick the file on your computer (just like you’re opening a file in a word processor or something). You can fill in one image for each of these boxes with the “Browse” buttons. There are more boxes below that - those are for uploading a file that’s already somewhere else on the Internet. Just enter the URL to the image in the box.

When you’re done entering the locations of images, click “Continue”. It’ll give you a message telling you whether the uploads were successful or not (in pretty much every case, it should be). Click “Continue” again.

The last step in uploading a file is to give some descriptive information and choose an album to place it in. For each of the files you uploaded, you’ll see a dialog asking for a title and a description for the image. Fill in those blanks if you want (it’s not necessary, but at least a title is a good idea) and then use the drop-down box next to “Album” to pick an album for your image. (Keywords are optional. They’re used to help people do a search for images.) Click “Continue” when you’re done, and repeat for each file you uploaded.

When you want to see the images you’ve posted, just click on “My Gallery” at the top, and look in the album you created. Want to see other users’ images? Use the “Album List” button near the top middle.

Linking to Gallery Images in the Weblog This is the last bit of info you’ll need to make image posts to the weblog. First off, upload the image(s) you want to link, as described above. Next, you’ll need two URLs: the URL of the image itself, and the URL of the preview image created by the gallery.

To get the preview image’s URL, find your image in the gallery and click on the thumbnail (a really small version of your image). Another version of your image should appear, with a bunch of other thumbnails beneath it. Right click the larger image on this page and pick “Copy Image Location” in Firefox. (If you’re using Internet Explorer, there’s no good way to copy this link yet - I’ll have to hack the thing to provide a link for you. Stupid IE - use Firefox instead ) Paste the link you just copied somewhere - if you’re reading ahead, you’ll have another browser window where you’ve started writing a new post to the weblog, and you can paste it there. Then, click on the image and a new window will pop up with the full-size version of the image. Right click that and pick “Copy Image Location” and paste that somewhere.

To put these in your weblog post, start making a new post to the weblog. Now, wherever you want your image to appear, put this:

<img src="URL to the smaller image goes here">

If you want to make it so that people can click on the image to see the full-size version, do this instead:

<a href="URL to the full-size image goes here"><img src="URL to smaller image goes here"></a>

That’s it, that’s all you need to know for the basics.

We’ll put up more info on posting images in collaborative albums and such later. We’ll use those for our special events, where we all take a picture according to some common theme. But for now, enjoy!