WordPress

Images

Inserting images in a blog post can be a tricky thing. This hit me when I set up a WordPress installation for some friends who wanted to have their photos on the site. There a few ways of doing it, I suppose, in WordPress (and probably others):

• Resizing the image manually with a graphics editing program, making thumbnails, FTPing them to your server, and linking to them as normal
• Using an offline blog editor to upload the files to the host and resize them for you (BlogJet does this – I don’t think Qumana does)
• Using the facility built in to WordPress to upload a photo to your server and produce the thumbnails on the fly
• Using an image hosting facility like Flickr or Photobucket to host, resize and link to your image. Flickr allows you to blog images straight from its own interface. This is the only real option available to a hosted blogger, unless they use Blogger and Google‘s godawful Hello thing.

In the end, I chose the third option, despite the fact that I ended up writing some pretty lengthy instructions on the topic. WordPress’ inbuilt image uploader and handler works really nicely, the pop-up image options are pretty easy to use. The obvious problem for real technophobes is that while WordPress generates a thumbnail for you, you may have to resize the original anyway, especially if it originated from a digital camera.

The next problem in WordPress is arranging the damn things once they are there. The only real way to do it is tables, and it is a real pain. I found the best way to do it was to insert each photo one by one into the editor, then open the HTML dialogue and insert the table tags around them. For my friends, I just said that if you have more than one image, then drop me an email. Writing up that one would just be a pain in the neck for all concerned.

Clearly, WordPress needs to have some sort of built in table manager, or some other way of arranging images in a post.

Qumana

As you can see from the tag at the bottom of this post, I am giving Qumana another try, for the odd longer post now and again. My interest has been piqued again after the various posts from people like Neville Hobson, Lee Hopkins and Allan Jenkins As Tris from Qumana knows, I usually find things to moan about. There are a few of things it is still missing in Beta 3:

• The above mentioned image handling thing
• An autoreplace function. This is present in BlogJet, and allows me to type, say, WordPress, which is automatically replaced with the HTML to link back to the WordPress site. The camel-case means this is unlikely to happen by accident!
• Ctrl-backspace doesn’t delete whole words. Can it, please?

One thing I love: adding hyperlinks. Qumana automatically copies whatever is in the clipboard into the dialogue, meaning I just have to hit return, as invariably I have copied the link from BlogLines or somewhere. And if I haven’t, the text is selected, so I can just type over it.

Tags: images, WordPress, Qumana

Powered by Qumana

One of the recommended actions for any blogger to take is to tag their posts, inserting appropriate links at the end of the post to a service like Technorati, say, which might be of use to a reader and will help increase the numbers of those visiting your blog. Hopefully.

I’ve been looking at a few ways of doing this. Some of the offline blogging tools allow you to do it – Qumana does, as indeed does Ecto. Most of my posts are made when I am away from my PC at home, and are therefore through the WordPress admin panel on the web. I had a crack, as Lorelle suggests, with Ultimate Tag Warrior, and found it a total pain in the arse – far too complicated for my liking.

Then Neville Hobson, who is clearly the King of WordPress plug-in recommendations, put forward the suggestion of Simple Tags – the title of which was music to my ears. It works beautifully – simply by adding the tags at the end of the post surrounded by the word tags in square brackets – like those you’d use on most forum systems these days.

Mega!

[tags]tags, wordpress, technorati[/tags]