Posting A Story

So here is an easy-to-access quick tutorial on how to post a story and some of the smaller, lesser known things to do when posting a story. Even if you’ve been posting stories for the last 6 years, I promise you will learn something new in the next 5 minutes that will benefit all mankind. Or at least 5 people that I know of. And it’s awesome.

In brief I’ll cover:
Accessing the editing area, Choosing the category, Adding “tags” to your story, How to add that neat little thumbnail image, How to add other images in the main section of your story

So, to post a story click on the “post a story” link at the top of the page:

Enter in your ID and password and once you are logged in, click on “Posts”:

After that, click on “Add New” from either link:

Now, the Money Page. This is where all the magic happens. On this page you should always do the following:

ALWAYS use an image. You can upload as many images as you’d like, but always choose a square one to use as the thumbnail image that gets used at the top of every post.

Choose a “tag”, or several “tags”. Tags are a way to categorize each post beyond a simple category. The tags can be created brand new for each post, or you can use existing tags. If I’m making a post about the Nantucket Knights World Series victory where Floyd Youmans crankws a HR, I would add the tags of “Floyd Youmans”, “World Series”, “Nantucket Knights”, “Walk-off”. The use of tags lets us click on “World Series” from a menu or a post or a “tag cloud” and see every post that was tagged with that word. They are really helpful and fun and that will be more evident the more we use them.

Choose a category. Self-explanatory really. Feel free to create a new category, but this is a more static element and at this point all categories should already exist.

From the custom fields section, select the field “Thumbnail”. This tells the server that the image URL you are pasting into the “Value” field is the thumbnail image for the post. I’ll show you how to upload an image and get the URL easily.

And of course, a title and story.

So let’s get to the nitty gritty and the thing that really makes the site POP and more fun for everyone. Images. Right beneath the field where you enter the title of your story, click on the image icon and you will see this screen:

[this is assuming you already have the image ready, I'll do a small image tutorial later]

Click on “Select Files” and a window will pop up asking you to select the file from your computer. I usually store all my images on my desktop and upload them from there. Once I’ve uploaded them, I clean them off my desktop. Some people create an image folder in their documents folder and do all their image work from there. How you do it doesn’t matter as long as you can remember where you stored that image that you stole from the internet.

Once you have double-clicked on the image you want to upload, it will upload automatically and you wait for this window to appear:

I’ve highlighted the section that holds the image URL. If you don’t see the URL, click on “File URL” directly underneath the Link URL field. You will want to copy this URL by highlighting it with your mouse and either right-clicking and choosing “copy” or by highlighting it with your mouse and hitting ctrl-c.

Once you have the image copied, click on the X in the top right corner of the window and get back to the “Money Page”.

Scroll down to the Custom Fields section, choose “Thumbnail” from the “Name” section and paste the URL you just copied into the “Value” field. You can paste by clicking in the “Value” field and right-click the mouse and select “paste”, or by clicking in the “Value” field and hitting ctrl-v.

You just created the main story thumbnail image.

So, that is the thumbnail. If you want to add other images to your post you can, by using the same method with a couple little tweaks. First, always keep in mind that the column where our stories all appear is only 550 pixels wide. This means that any image you use will first need to be resized to less than 550 pixels in width in order for it to appear correctly on the website. Luckily, the Upload Image feature in WordPress will resize automatically. Let’s go back to that page. So, you’ve clicked on the Upload Image icon from the Money Page, you’ve selected your file, and you are back to this page:

I’ve highlighted the “tweaks” I mentioned earlier. If your image is more than 550 pixels wide, it will give you the option to choose 4 different sizes. I used a different image for this example because the Albert Pujols picture I used before was less than 300 pixels. The options are:

Full Size – never use if image is more than 550 pixels wide

Large – I’ve set the server to interpret “Large” as the maximum width of the story column, 550 pixels.

Medium – 250 Pixels, or roughly half the size of the story column

Thumbnail – 150 pixels (not the same as the main story thumbnail)

The other option that is important is the “Alignment”. The default is center, but you can choose Left, Right, or None. Alignment is important for those 2nd, 3rd, and 4th images that are in the body of the story. Using alignment is also important because it will wrap the text around the images. Here is an example of the different alignments:

Once you have chosen the alignment and size options, click on “Insert Into Post”. Voila! One thing to remember that is actually REALLY IMPORTANT is that before you click on the Upload Image icon from the Money Page, that you select with your mouse where you want the image to appear in your story. And yes, images need to be done one at a time. All you do is click on the line from the story section where you want your image to appear. The cursor should be visible. Then, go through the steps to upload your image and that is where the image will be inserted.

Any questions?