Autiblogger Tips

Two new plugins were installed today. One is a flickr posts bar which adds thumbnails of the most recent photos from a user’s flickr account to the post-writing page, making it very easy to insert a flickr image into a blog post.

Also added is a LiveJournal cross-posting plugin which automatically copies new posts to a specified LiveJournal. Editing and deleting cross-posted entries causes the same changes to be made on the LiveJournal.

Both of these are user level plugins, which means that if you would like to use them, they must be activated from the plugins section of your administration. For more information about plugins, view this post.

Other changes include increased protection against splogs (spam blogs), bug fixes to the Friends List, and new links in the admin bar that appears at the top of the page when you are logged in. A Random Blog link has also been added to the bar.

Plugins are additions to autiblogger/wordpress that let you do more things with your blog. There are several installed by default as soon as your blog is created. These are on all the time for everybody and include things like widgets, the admin bar, and the spam karma 2 spam blocker.

Starting today, there will be plugins that each user can choose to activate or deactivate. Plugins are activated deactivated by default. To activate plugins (and view a list of currently installed plugins), go the the ‘Plugins’ tab which now appears in your administration section.

The first plugin is the ‘Simple Tags’ plugin which allows you to easily add Technorati Tags to your posts. Technorati is a very popular blog search engine. To tag a word (or group of words) in your post, surround the word(s) with [ tag ] and [ /tag ]. Do not included the spaces in the [ tag ] tags! They appear in this post for display reasons only.

Example: [ tag ]words to be tagged[ /tag ]

The tagged words will be listed at the bottom of your post, and links will lead to a Technorati tag search to find other people who have used that same tag.

More plugins will be added over time and requests for plugins are now being accepted. During beta testing, plugins that will place a high demand on the server (such as video plugins) and certain other plugins will not be installed. It is possible that these plugins may be added at a later time.

[tag]example of tagged words[/tag]

You can now have a ‘Friends List’ with links to your Autiblogger friends’ websites in the ‘Latest Activity’ section of your Dashboard. Please note that this link may not necessarily be a link to the person’s blog on Autiblogger. It will be a link to the website that is listed in their profile.

To add a friend to your list, log in to your admin section and click on the ‘Users’ tab. Once you are in the Users section, click on the ‘Friend List’ tab. Use the ‘Friend Search’ to find the friend that you would like to add to your list. If your friend appears in the search results list, check the box next to their ID. The user will be added to your Friend List and will receive an email telling them that they have been added.

If there is one or more friend in your Friend List, the list will appear in the ‘Latest Activity’ section of your Dashboard. Click on your friend’s link to go to their website.

An Upload Space meter has been added to the dashboard at the bottom of the ‘Latest Activity’ sidebar in the ‘Blog Stats’ section.

It tells you the amount of upload space that is currently available . There is also a graphical meter. The blue bar gets smaller as you use more space. The grey bar on the bottom represents the total space available.

Uploading an image from your computer

• When you are in the screen where you are writing your post, look just below the posting window and you will see an ‘Upload’ window.
• Click the ‘Browse…’ button to find your picture on your computer hard drive.
• Enter a title and description if you want.
• Click ‘Upload’.

Once the picture is uploaded, you will see it in the upload window. If you don’t, there will be a new tab called ‘Browse’. Click that to see the picture.

To insert the picture into your post, put your cursor in the place where you would like the image to go in your post and then click on the thumbnail image in the ‘Browse’ window and choose ‘Send to editor’. Once the image is in your editor, you can drag, drop, and resize it.

Using an image that is on the internet

If your picture is already on the internet, use the insert picture link in the editor. It is a button with a picture of a tree on it, directly to the left of the spell check button (the one with the ABC and a checkmark). Enter the image information in the box that pops up.

If you are not using the rich visual editor, click on the button that is called [img] and enter the image url in the popup box. Another box will pop up for a title.

If you are using a browser that does not support the editors, you must enter the html to display the image. Here is an example for an image called ‘test.jpg’.

<img src=”http://mydomain.com/test.jpg” alt=”test” />

Replace http://mydomain.com/test.jpg with the location of your image. Replace the alt text (test) with a description of the image.

A few quick facts about widgets…

• Using widgets will replace the default sidebar on your blog. If you want the default sidebar back, remove all widgets from the sidebar box.
• To use widgets, go to the ‘Presentation’ section of your admin area, and click on the tab called ‘Sidebar Widgets’.
• Drag and drop the widgets you want to use from the bottom of the page (they are the little rectangles) to the ‘Sidebar’ box above.
• If there is a little box graphic next to the widget title, it means that there are one or more options that you can configure for that widget, such as changing the title.
• You can change the order that the widgets are displayed in your sidebar by dragging them to the spot you want them to appear.
• You must click on the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom right of the page before any changes are applied to your blog.

If you have any questions, please comment here. Other people will probably have similar questions.

The ‘Dipdolt Reload’ theme has just been added. This is a modification of the dipdolt themes by Darjan Panic and Brian Green which was modified by Patrick Chia into the multi-theme version, and further modified by me to make the picture change along with everything else.

It is a really nice theme and you have a choice to display it in one of five color schemes. To pick a color theme, go to the ‘Presentation’ section of your admin panel and choose ‘Dipdolt Reload’ as your theme. Once it is loaded, click on the ‘Skin Options’ tab that will appear in the dark blue menu at the top, next to the ‘Themes’ tab.

Choose a color scheme by clicking the radio button (circle) with the name of the color that you want, and then click the ‘Apply Skin Style’ button on the bottom right.

The StripedPlus theme from The undersigned is very easy to customize right from the ‘Presentation’ area of your administration panel.

To use this theme, click on the Presentation tab and then on the picture for the StripedPlus theme. This will change you blog’s theme to StripedPlus. When that is done, click on the ‘Current Theme Options’ tab that will appear in the Presentation section in the darker blue bar next to the Themes tab.

From this screen, you will have the option to change the theme colors, background image, font style and colors, page width, and more.

One other thing about this theme, which I can’t decide if I like or not, is that when you hover over the word ‘Navigation’, a menu of categories and pages will drop down.

Give it a try!

Welcome to the Autiblogger Tips blog. I am Lori, and I created and run Autiblogger.com. This blog will include instructions and tips for making blogging at Autiblogger fun and easy!

If you have any tips that you want to share, click on the ‘Contact Autiblogger’ link in your administration panel (top right corner under ‘Sign Out’ link) and send them in!