instructions – Page 2

Promote your site with a Squidoo lens

Have you heard of Squidoo? I’ve been a member of Squidoo since 2005, shortly after the site opened it’s doors to those who wanted to promote their websites in a very different way.

Squidoo allows members to make what they call a lens. A lens is a window to promote perhaps another sites or a number of similar sites on the internet. You can add as much information to your lens as you like in order to point others towards your website.

I made my first lens, as I said, back in 2005. It was for my reptile and amphibian care website
. I have information on that site about a lot of different reptiles but the majority is for one type of lizard – the water dragon. So what I did was to add snippets of care information to the lens that I created that lead to specific pages on my website where my lens visitors could learn even more in depth information about the care of the water dragon lizard. I did the same thing on another lens for iguana care.

I was also able to add modules to my lens that allowed me to select items from online stores like overstock.com, Amazon and many others for which, if I sold any items through my lens I’d get a percentage of the royalties that Squidoo made off the sale. Profits from a lens can also be donated to a number of charities as well.

I didn’t do much with my lens over the last year, but I’ve recently gone back and given them an overhaul adding new modules and updating the information.

As I said you can do as much or as little to your lens as you’d like. If you were to create one for your website you might add your RSS feed so that visitors could see your latest posts, as well as write a summary of what your site is about. You can also add link modules in order to link to similar types of sites.

I’ve now created lens for all of the blogs that my husband and I run. Each one has a summary of the blog, RSS feeds, links, shopping modules and I’ve added as many tags to the lenses as possible that describe the site accurately so that people will be able to find my lens easily on Squidoo or perhaps even via a search engine.

Visitors to your lens can rank your lens from one to five stars, so if you create a lens try to do a good job so that you’ll get a good rating. I believe the rating system helps with a lens popularity on the site as well.

The people as squidoo also send out newsletters telling members of popular lenses each day and you can apply to have your own lens promoted in order to get more visitors and ratings for your lens.

Check it out for yourself. At the very least it’s another way to promote your website and at the most it’s a way to make a little bit of extra money if your lens does well!

Visit Squidoo to make your own Lens.

How to place image code in a WordPress post

by Tricia

I’ve found that while a number of people have mastered the art of using their WordPress blog to write text based posts they often have trouble adding images. Since there are a lot of bloggers out there who are not true webmasters in the sense that they know how to write basic code I thought I’d occasionally write some easy to follow instructions.

How to place an image to a WordPress post:

In an earlier post I told you how to upload an image into a post. Here I will discuss how to center an image, or wrap text to the left or right of an image.

Note: This technique might work well with other blogging platforms too. I’m only writing it as wordpress instructions since that is the blogging platform that I’ve used the most.

To center a picture just either center it while you are in “rich text editor” mode, or put this extra code around the image code itself:

image code

To have a photo to the left or right of a paragraph you must have the paragraph tags around the particular paragraph that you’re sticking the image in :

ie text of paragraph

with your image code beside the first paragraph tag

< image code > text

BUT … inside the image code simple put align=”left” or “right” near the img tag like this

< img align="left" rest of image code ....

Please eliminate all of the spaces between the tag codes when you place this code on your site. For instance shouldn’t have spaces between the < and > tags.

BTW hope this helps!

Put an Image in a WordPress post

by Tricia

I’ve been hanging out on some blogging related forums and one of the questions that often comes up is how to add an image into a post. There are actually several ways to do this, and once you’ve done it a few times you’ll find that it’s very easy.

I’m writing these instructions out for the WordPress blogging platform, but some of the techniques that I’ll discuss will likely apply quite easily to other blogging platforms.

How to add images to your blog post:

Method one – using image links:

If you have images uploaded onto a free photo hosting site such as Flickr or Photobucket you can easily add the image link to your post. Simply copy the image link from the photo hosting site and use the image button in the top of your post writing area to paste the link into the box that pops up after you’ve clicked the image button.

Just be sure that your cursor is in the area that you’d like the image to be placed when you click on the image button. Otherwise you’ll have to cut and paste the image code into the correct area.

Method two – uploading and image:

If you’ve taken photos with a digital camera or saved photos to your computer it’s pretty easy to upload them into your WordPress post. All you need to do is use the upload section that is directly below your post writing area in WordPress.

One thing to keep in mind before uploading photo files to your server and then into your post is the size of the file. If you are posting in Rich text format you can easily adjust the height and width of any image, but you can’t adjust the kilobytes. You should make sure that the file is preferably less than 20 kb in size before you upload it into a post otherwise it will dramatically slow the loading time of your post.

If you have photo editing software use it to edit the post for the web by making it a compressed jpeg or gif image – try to maintain the quality of the photo while you reduce the size in regard to kilobytes.

Now, when you are in writing mode in WordPress take a look just below the post content box. You’ll see an area called “Upload”. If the upload area isn’t open click on the + sign to open it.

You’ll see an area that says “File” within the Upload box. Select browse and find the image that you’d like to add to your post. You may chose to also file in the title and description information for the image file at this time as well.

Once you’ve selected the image file on your computer, click on the word upload in the bottom right of the Upload area.

After a moment the file will be uploaded and you’ll see a small thumbnail of the photo.

In WordPress 2.0 you must click on the picture to choose between adding the thumbnail of the image or the full size image to your post. Once you’ve selected which image size you’d like to use, place your cursor in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be placed, and then go back to the image and click on the words “Send Image to Editor”.

In WordPress 2.1 you’ll see several selections beside the thumbnail of the image. You can use the full size or thumbnail of the image, and you can also choose to link to the image file or not.

Since I often edit my images ahead of time to make sure they are of an appropriate size for the post I usually choose full size and none before selecting “Send to Editor”. If you’d like to use a thumbnail of your image in the post you might choose to link to the image so that your visitors can click on the link and see a larger image on a separate page.

Once you are done selecting the image size and any thing else that you’d like to choose for your image click on “Send to Editor”. Just be sure that your cursor placed in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be placed. Otherwise you’ll have to cut and paste to get the image in the right area.

Then TA DA you have a photo inserted into your post.

So how is that? Clear as mud or do you have a better understanding of how to place an image in your post now?

Don’t forget to read my article on how to center or align your image to the right or left of post text.

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