How to make your posts better - it's the simple things!

Many people want to know how to do fairly simple things to their posts; like add an image, embed a YouTube video, or change the color and size of their font.

If you have questions on how to do something - ask them here!

If you have awesome tips and tricks to help your fellow "technically challenged" permie - post them here!

**Also - PLEASE keep this thread for "how tos" ONLY so that they don't get lost amongst other posts.

I highly recommend that if you do use different colors, sizes, italics, bold, etc, that you use the 'preview' function before hitting the submit button. That way, you can quickly see if you have things the way you wanted them. It is easy to not properly close a BBCode, and this will be readily apparent if you preview the post first.

How to: Include Photos or Other Attachments in a Permies Posts
(When the picture is already saved to the computer desktop)

Step 1 Start new thread or post reply.

Step 2 Select Attachments tab next to Options tab. (Outlined in red).



Step 3 Select Choose File.



Step 4 Another window will open defaulting to the Desktop. If your photo is saved to the computers desktop, use the scroll bar to locate it. In my example Water lilies is the name of my picture. (If your picture is saved elsewhere on the computer use the down arrow to the right of the Look in: menu line).



When you select the photo, the file name will appear with as the name of the picture.

Then select Open.



Step 5 Once Open is selected the mini screen will disappear. Back at the Permies site the title of the picture will appear to the right of the Choose File button.

A description could also be added.



Step 6 Select the Submit button.


*Note: Utilize the Preview button (to the left of Submit) to see how what it looks like before posting.

I originally posted this in another thread about posting youtube vidoes, but it might be useful here, if only to let you know you are not alone in your suffering...

*************************************************************************************

My routine goes something like this.

Go to youtube video.
Copy the link on top of the page.
Click youtube button and paste link into the box.
Hit preview.
Cuss a while.

Go back to youtube.
Click 'share'.
Copy the conveniently highlighted link, click youtube button in reply, paste link, hit preview.
Cuss a load more.

Click the name of the person who posted the youtube video. Search desperately on their site until you find the video. Cope the link location and see if it is any different to any of the ones you already have. If so, copy and paste that into the box.
Hit preview.
Cuss till you're blue in the face.

Experiment with all versions of the link you have adding and taking away 's' everywhere you can think of.

Try searching for keywords in the youtube search engine and see if anything different shows up.

Make yourself a nice cup of tea.

Repeat all previous steps several times.

At some point, for no known reason, one of the links will work. Usually.

Hope this helps.

It sure helped me letting it all out...

Burra - sounds amusing, but I have to say I've never had a problem posting youtube links.

One thing I have realised is that many people are simply blind to the buttons at the top when typing a reply/posting.

Using the URL button when posting a link makes them short and pretty.

Using the Youtube button embeds videos properly in the page. Just paste the page address of the youtube video in.

Using the Img button lets you embed an image (from elsewhere on the web) directly in a page.

Using the List button lets you make nice bullte points

Not using these can break the display of whole threads, especially for people using smaller monitor displays.

If you ARE planning on posting images then I think you should take the time to compress them to a reasonable size and keep the dimensions small. Width of about 800px is usually appropriate for the web as pretty much all displays can cope with it. Smaller images also load faster and save bandwidth for people on slow connections.

The experience of navigating and posting on permies on a mobile device is different, and it is worth noting that at the bottom of the screen on the mobile site is a link to the full site with all the buttons and options.

Navigating the full site on a tiny touchscreen can be tricky but it makes for better posts.

I for one have noticed the buttons at the top, but I'm not that comfortable using them. Could someone walk us techno-newbs through the steps, like A.J. did with the pictures (that was wonderful, I think anybody having trouble with it could follow that quite easily).

I think it's less that we don't see the buttons than that it isn't clear how to use them. If I'm in the middle of a post, and I want a certain word to be a link, how do I go about that? It doesn't seem to work quite right if I just highlight the text and then hit the "URL" button...I'm assuming that I then need to enter the url in the box above, but by the time I get there it's already gone back to the "color" text that is the default.

It probably seems simple to somebody who knows how to do it already, but let's for a moment pretend I'm an idiot.

How to use the URL button.


When you want to create a link in a post it is often nice for it to appear in context within a sentence and have a nice description so people know what they are clicking on.

click the url button

paste the link into the first box and click ok

type the descriptive phrase into the next box.

Making it appear within as sentence just needs a little thought about where you position the link within your post. Sometimes it can be easier to create the link first and then add words before or after.

If in doubt click preview so you can see what it looks like.

As a side note, when you do see a link, don't just click it.
Before you click it, hover your mouse on it and look around the bottom of your screen, and the actual link should be shown there - varies exactly where, depending on which browser you are using, but usually somewhere along the bottom of the window.

The reason I advise this, is that a lot of spammers like to fool you. The highlighted text may say "Free subscription" but the link may be to "nikeshoes4less.com". I have seen some scary sites hidden in innocent looking links.

Jessica Gorton wrote:I for one have noticed the buttons at the top, but I'm not that comfortable using them. Could someone walk us techno-newbs through the steps, like A.J. did with the pictures (that was wonderful, I think anybody having trouble with it could follow that quite easily).

I am happy to pick up that gauntlet...I was thinking if folks thought my How To post was beneficial I could document others. Things like embedding the YouTube video, making a word be a link, quoting other people's posts to reply. Really anything. I will mock up screenshots using step-by-step instructions and post them in this thread. Just let me know what else would be helpful.

A.J.

"Making a word a link"

How does one make a word a link?


Edit: Is this what you mean by "Using the URL button when posting a link makes them short and pretty" Michael? I am blind to the top buttons, there are just so many of them.

Edit two: for the details

Edit three: for the aesthetics

To make a word, or phrase into a link ("Anchor text"), you need to use the URL button.
Here, I will make a link to a site selling Black Locust seeds:

1st - click the URL button. When the box opens, paste in the URL, then click "OK"
Then enter the word(s) you want to use as the anchor text, and click "OK" again
What appears on screen is the highlighted anchor text:
(Before entering the URL or anchor text, hit the <DEL> key to clear preexisting text from the box)

Black Locust Seeds

That makes the post much more readable than some of those URLs that take up a whole line of space.

Cool,

Thanks guys it worked. Easy Peasy

Yes!!! I added my first link....we are just this last week on line at home with something other than an old black and white 3G kindle....thank you all for good instruction

Simple thing really, (but a pet peeve...), but if you compose in Google Chrome with the spell check extension then you get perfect spelling every time.

Click the Chrome menu Chrome menu on the browser toolbar.

Select Settings.

Click Show advanced settings.

In the "Languages" section, click Languages and input settings.

In the Languages and Input dialog that appears, use the "Enable spell checking" check box to turn the spell-checker on or off.

Improper spelling gets underlined in red.

Firefox and MS Explorer both have third party add ons, just search "spell check".

Not really a 'how-to'...
My vision's dodgy, and I find it waay easier to read a post with short, sentences/paragraphs.
I've even taken to breaking sentences up so things 'scan' more easily.
Do I get to go offtopic now?

Eric Thomas wrote:Simple thing really, (but a pet peeve...), but if you compose in Google Chrome with the spell check extension then you get perfect spelling every time.

One of my pedantic spelling things is that people in NZ hit spellcheck,
and perfectly good spelling goes all 'American'.
Hurrumph

Leila, I had the singular privilege to work in Auckland for a few weeks, back in another lifetime. What a great town with wonderful people!

Check your Google Chrome version (or download the latest), then go to the "Customize/Control" menu, Settings, Advanced Settings..., click on the Language and input settings icon,

Click on "Add" in the bottom left corner. I just checked it and "English New Zealand" is most definitely an option.

Eric Thomas wrote: I had the singular privilege to work in Auckland for a few weeks

Auckland's our version of those big, flash cities that aren't the capital-Los Angeles, Sydney...
Us that don't live there often feel like we're more arty, complicated and have better coffee, but also know we're missing fun stuff like warm weather and bright clothes not looking out of place

Eric Thomas wrote:Check your Google Chrome version...I just checked it and "English New Zealand" is most definitely an option

Not an issue for me-I use a firefox add-on, and I'm allergic to 'z' where 's' belongs anyway...
I suppose it was more a general, and basically pointless whine!
Actually not entirely pointless-if anyone here doesn't speak American, I'm pretty sure all browsers can be set to other forms of English.

Flash city! At the slight risk of going OT, my experience was <quite> a while ago and "Flash" wouldn't have been the adjective that I would have used. I might have to start my own "Senior Permies" forum, that was a long time ago! I remember it as a really mellow walking city, we walked everywhere and so did everyone else, cars were pretty scarce. I also remember that the pubs were SRO every night with some of the very nicest and most interesting folks I've ever had the pleasure to crack a pint with. It's one of the few places that I would really like to go back to someday.

This is an extremely helpful thread...clear step by step....I've been unleashed into the world of posting youtube videos

Great information on technical stuff here.

If it's on-topic, I'd like to add that things that make posts helpful for me, and so many posts have been exactly this way (if this is off-topic can someone move it to a better place? I would find it really useful to have more on this):

posting answers to questions:
--an answer to a question is relevant to my context (both urban/rural/suburban/farm/other as well as zone, etc.)
--multiple elements serving a single function -- many solutions so I can pick among them!
--solutions that don't cost any money (e.g. if you want more snakes to patrol your garden, pile some stones up next it -- stones are free in New England! some people might even pay you to take their stones! woohoo!)
--experience -- if you can say "I did this and it worked, I observed xyz"
--diversity of perspectives, and redundancy-many different people solving the same problem from different perspectives makes for amazing variety of solutions and robustness!
--speed of resopnse--can really help teh rhythm of the garden when you're in the process of doing stuff and a question or obstacle comes up and then--let me look that up on Permies, I'll be back in 30 minutes!
--possibilitariansm/can-do perspective! releasing the assumption that the current situation indicates the limits of the possible

posting questions:
--clear what the context is, as much as you can think to put in: urban/suburban/rural, high altitude/low, dry/wet, cold/hot, east/west slope, flat/hlly, clayey/sandy


And the vast preponderance of posts have followed the guideline--"be nice!" -- which really makes posts more useful too in comparison to the added low-level stress if we didn't take the care to be nice to one another.

Also the creativity of everyone is really really inspiring!
I may not have the funds or knowledge to contribute much in money or expertise to the site at this time, but when I do I will gladly pay it back/pay it forward!

Thanks all, you're wonderful and it's a wonderful world!

Posting photos from instagram.

Instagram seems to want to make it difficult to share pictures.

From the instagram page, you need to right click your mouse and then select "view page source", or the equivalent depending on what browser you're using.

Then you need to hunt all that scary looking script stuff for the link. When I've done it, it's been the first thing that includes the word 'photo', so I hunt for that, then copy the entire link and paste it into the little box that pops up when I click the IMG button when making a post.

Here's a quick picture pointing to the YouTube button.

I am pretty good at using the buttons at the top for posting things but I have not figured this one out:
Some posts contain a table with a link to a sketchup file. How is this done?
Are they using Table and linking to an online file like Google Docs?
I have succeeded in posting screen shots of the model but I would like to share the file for more experienced users to tinker with it.

Hans Quistorff wrote:I am pretty good at using the buttons at the top for posting things but I have not figured this one out:
Some posts contain a table with a link to a sketchup file. How is this done?
Are they using Table and linking to an online file like Google Docs?
I have succeeded in posting screen shots of the model but I would like to share the file for more experienced users to tinker with it.

Hi i think you use the attachments button under your reply window. You have to use a zip file I think. Folllow the red circle and then the red arrow i put on the screen shot I'm posting under:

Hi everyone!

How does one make a link clickable in their signature... like the posters on this thread, Burra, Jessica, Dave, and Lorenzo?

I hope I can successfully lead you through the process. I'm going to attempt to use a screenshot so that, hopefully, you'll be able to see the link as it needs to be written. Let's try this.

Click on "My Profile" in the dashboard at the top of any page.
Click on "General Information About Yourself".
You'll see the text box to add your signature there.

I see this is written in your signature line presently:
www.earthenexposure.com
Let's make it an active link.

Thanks much, Karen! I did as you suggested but wasn't able to make it work. You can see my signature to see what I mean. What did I miss?

rusty

Rusty Bowman wrote:Thanks much, Karen! I did as you suggested but wasn't able to make it work. You can see my signature to see what I mean. What did I miss?

rusty

yurt rentals ° permaculture ° sculptures ° paleotechnics ° resource guide ° whitewater kayak camping how-to
_______________________
http://www.earthenexposure.com

So it works in the thread... but not in the signature.  I wonder why.

It could be because staff and pollinators have a different signature set up - I think PIE people do too.  

how about trying earthenexposure

[url=http://www.earthenexposure.com]earthenexposure[/url]