I've just posted my first MHF blog entry and, yes, I'm sure I could benefit from some help too. I'm entirely new to blogging so when other blogging sites are mentioned I've no idea at all where or what these are. I did sign on to MySpace once, setting up an account, but never used it though I sometimes still get e-mails, usually from someone purporting to be Fiona or Melissa or similar and offering me all sorts of delights in exchange for my bank details or a few hundred quid! :roll:
So first off it might be helpful if someone could point me at some sites so I can have an alternative. I want to post a diary of a 3 month tour in Europe and I think I can make this interesting by including some site reviews, experiences etc (yes the site reviews will also find their way into the MHF database of course). I also want to do this so my family and friends can track our progress and adventures - they have asked if I can do this.
My first entry describes the plan for the tour and came out more or less OK with a couple of clear exceptions. It may be worth mentioning that I have IE7 as my browser. I did not prepare the entry in another program such as Word to paste it in, but typed it directly into the Blog editor. This had a toolbar at the top allowing some formatting (bold, italic, indentation, bulleting, numbered list) and some insertion (URLs, images etc). Beneath this is an instruction to enclose paragraphs between HTML tags
and
. So of course I did! But I also did a RETURN between each para.
What do you know - there are all my
s and
s in plain text for everyone to see. So why the instruction???
I guess I just leave out all those
s and
s next time, do I?
I also tried an indented section (not a bulleted or numbered list, just an indented series of paragraphs, each again with the
and
tags but all of them supposedly indented. Well they are not indented in the output. So why the indent button on the toolbar?
I didn't do anything as daring as trying to put in a photo. But this thread so far has completely confused me over that. Lots of stuff about uploading images to a database (where?, how?). If there is a button saying Insert Image, can't I just use that? But what happens when I click it? Does it present me with a standard Windows file browser or is the image file to be inserted expected to be in a particular location.
Whoever posted the advice about the preferred image size in pixels, heartfelt thanks! At least that's clear!
I must agree with whoever said that the MHF blog facility is far from friendly. No preview, no spellcheck, no edit, limited instructions and misleading ones where they exist!
I'm not a complete IT idiot - I used to work in it, but my knowledge is a bit dated and I don't speak HTML (and I don't much want to learn it).
Looking round the blog entries there are clearly folk out there who have cracked this and can create clear, fairly good-looking entries with no silles in them. Please can one or two of you more expert bloggers help out we newbies by posting on here? And if you can/do, please be gentle in terms of concepts or terms we might not understand.
Roger