How to write a blog post

You'd be surprised at how many features our web site has. No, really; you would. Tucked underneath the surface is a whole array of community features that you might not be aware of, and over the coming days and weeks, I'm going to be posting a series of blog entries about how to join in and contribute to our Windows Vista community.

Today's post is a simple one, and more than a little self-referential; I'll be talking you through how to make a blog post on our web site. Please bear in mind that this information is accurate at the time of posting it, so if you can't follow the process or there's a screengrab that doesn't exist anymore, please do e-mail me. That said, I'm pretty sure that whilst the look of the site might change, the basic process will stay the same.

Log in

First things first. To post a blog entiry, you'll need to log in. You can do this by clicking 'login' at the top right hand corner of the web site.

Enter your username and password, then click on login. If you've entered your details correctly, you should be returned to the main home page, but with one difference; at the top right of the web site, you should see a welcome message and a link to your profile. Click 'profile' and welcome a brand new screen of potentially confusing options.

For the purposes of this guide, ignore the others for now. Click on 'Add a new post to the site, or manage your previous posts' and prepare yourself for a peek behind the curtain.

Behind The Scenes

One of the things we're quite excited about on the site is that we're giving users exactly the same system that we use, hopefully putting everyone on the same playing field. However, the system can seem daunting at first, so read on for an explanation.

Firstly, click on the 'New Blog Post' button in the left hand column. You should see a screen pop up, asking for a title for your blog post.

Type it in and enter okay. If things have gone fine, you'll see a new entry in the top right pane, and a preview of your blog post below it. For the moment, is just has a title, so click 'Edit document' above the preview. A new pop-up window will appear.

Wow, lots of options here. The best way to tackle this screen is to do what we do; ignore everything and concentrate on the necessities for now.

First thing to do is enter a 'kicker', which is a description of the post when it's listed on the site. Mine was 'How to write a blog post on our very own web site'. Secondly, you can assign small words to describe the post in the 'tags' section. I used 'web site', 'tutorial' and 'blog post'. Seperate each one with a comma (','), else it will think they are all the same tag.

Now, just type away! If you really need to, you can even add sub-headings, located just below the kicker box.

We usually use 'heading 3' for sub-headings, but feel free to experiment.

Add a picture

You can make your blog post much more readable by posting pictures. To do this, you first need to put a picture on our web site. Go back to the content window and click '+ Media'.

Another pop-up will appear. Click 'upload' and you should see a window that allows you to browse your own computer. Simply select an image and press 'okay'. The pop-up should confirm what the image is and its size.

Press 'upload' and your image will be uploaded to the web site. Now you just need to put it into your blog post. Go back to the post and look underneath the 'tags' textbox for a icon of some mountains and a sun. If you hover over it, a label reading 'Insert Image' should appear.

Click the icon and type in the name of the image you've just uploaded, including the extension. For example, I uploaded blogpost01.png, so here I type in 'blogpost01.png' and press okay.

Changing the Image Size and Aligning it

So now I have my image, but saying it's slightly big is an understatement.

Our main column on the web site allows for images 400 pixels wide, so if you're uploading something bigger, it's worth reducing the size. The simplest option is to resize images before you upload them (which you can do with the free Irfanview image-editing program; just open the image and go to Image and then Resize/Resample) but it's possible to resize them on the site. This can only be done by going into the HTML, but Don't Panic! You won't be there long and it's quite simple anyway. So click the HTML tab at the bottom of the blog editing window, and don't forget to breathe.

If you've just inserted an image, you're looking for something like <IMG SRC= and then the image name you've just inserted. To resize it, simple stick in WIDTH=x HEIGHT=y next to the image name, where x is how long you want the file to be and y is how tall you want it to be. Once you've done that, you should end up with something looking like what I entered; <IMG SRC=blogpost01.png WIDTH=400 HEIGHT=300>. Don't forget the > at the end though, otherwise things might start going a little bit crazy.

Now click on the 'Design' tab at the bottom left hand corner of the screen. You should see your image, gloriously resized. As an added bonus, you can now boast to your friends that you can code HTML, because you did!

For those perfectionists, you can also center the image in the center of the column. To do this, click on the image and then click on the 'Justify Center' icon, below the bottom right hand corner of the kicker text box. If you're familiar with Office or Word then you should have no troubles recognising the icon.

All done. Now you have your blog post completed, it's time to go about posting it.

Publishing your Post

Publishing posts is usually an easy business; you just click 'ok' at the bottom right of the blog editing window and then click 'ok' when it asks you to publish it. However, if you've accidentally not published your post, you can easily go back into the editing window and do it manually. From the main screen, click 'edit document' again, then set the published status (at the top right) from draft to published. Job done.

Log out of the system and have a look on the website. You should see your post there, ready for the world to read.