How to blog on Ourmedia

You have two ways to blog on Ourmedia.

Personal blog

All Ourmedia members get a free personal blog. To post, just choose post to my blog in the left nav. Enter a Title (or headline) and Body (for the body text).

If you have "rich text editor" enabled in your user profile (in your user account under the edit tab, account settings), you should be able to see WYSIWYG toolbars immediately above the Body window. Here, you can add boldface, italics, underline, strikethrough, undo and redo, erase formatting, add bullets, indent, add a text link, image, table, rule and more. Mouse over each icon to see what it does.

You can also get into the raw code of your entry by selecting the <> (carats) symbol, located to the right of the insert rule line. To the right of carats is a coolio Enlarge Editor function that calls up a separate window for your entry. It's all a part of the WYSIWYG editor for text form fields called HTMLArea.

Comments

Only registered Ourmedia members may post a comment on your blog. You may edit your own blog posts later on by clicking on the edit tab or clicking on the headline (we know, not intuitive — we'll fix that).

Unfortunately, Drupal does not currently permit members to edit or delete a comment posted on your blog or on your media page. If a comment violates our Site rules, then let a moderator know and he or she will remove it. Be sure to include your name, the exact url of the page in question, the specific comment you object to, and the reason you'd like it removed.

Ourmedia Weblog

All members may also post to the Ourmedia Weblog, a group or community blog. You can see it at the bottom of the front page. Every comment posted by a member will appear on the site's home page. We'll need to reconsider that open posting policy if it is abused.

You may edit your own blog posts later on. You do so by clicking on the headline (we know, not intuitive — we'll fix that, too).

The Ourmedia Weblog is intended for those who want to comment about the site in general or who want to share a work they've published that may hold widespread interest. Go to the Community Forums to hold discussions about topics of particular interest, such as podcasting, videoblogging, photography — or whatever subject strikes your fancy.

Including a photo or video in your post

Want to include a photo (like this), audio file, video or text file in your blog post? Here's how. (Hang on, Drupal doesn't make it easy.) Two ways to do this.

You can use the built-in image editor:

1) Choose the "Insert/Modify Image" icon to the right of the Insert Web Link icon in the WYSIWYG toolbar.

2) When the window pops open, if you want to point to an image already on the Web or on Ourmedia, you may enter the url of the image file in the Image URL field.

If you are uploading a new image, use the Upload File fields. Browse to find the image on your hard drive, assign a descriptive phrase, and click Upload. After it's uploaded, you should see it in Image Preview. Click OK to insert it onto your page.

Alternatively, you can do this:

1) Select post to my blog.

2) At the bottom of the page, under Attachments, choose Browse.

3) Click Submit (or Attach, then Submit)

4) You'll see the url of the media file that's now stored on our servers. Re-edit your blog post and link to it like so: <img src="imageurl">

Coming features

We plan to add Trackback to blogs soon after we launch. Please suggest other enhancements you'd like to see.

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