A picture is worth a thousand words or so the old saw goes and it is certainly true that an image can greatly help the look of a blog post.
Several people have asked me recently how to add images to blog posts so I thought I’d put up a blog post explaining how I do it in case it would be useful for others.
I store my images online on Flickr. When I want to use an image in a blog post I use the copy of the image which is stored on Flickr. This has the advantages that:
- it saves me diskspace from my hosting account,
- it saves me bandwidth from my hosting account and
- it is easy because Flickr provides the code to use the image from their site!
Being a simple soul, I like it when things are made easy for me.
How do I do it?
Well, click on the image you want to use in your Flickr account. If you don’t have a Flickr account, get one! A free account will allow you to upload 200 images and if you need more than that it costs around $25 p.a.
Once you have selected your image, click on the All Sizes button above the picture.
This brings you to the Available Sizes screen. Here you decide which image size you want in your blog post and select it. I generally go for images around 500 pixels wide (although the one selected below is 240 pixels wide).
When you select the size you want, the code required to place the image in your blog post is in the field under:
1. Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage:
Copy and paste that code into your blog post et voilà , you now have an image in your blog post.
Shemas Eivers is the MD of Client Solutions and he was at a meeting I also attended recently. Shemas was asking about tools for SEO and when I replied that blogs are the most powerful tool I know of for increasing SEO, Shemas didn’t seem to believe me. Fair enough.
Shemas this post is for you!
Why are blogs so good at increasing a website’s SEO?
- Every blog post has its own url (so each post can be linked to individually - this leads to increased inward linkage)
- Search engines love content and a blog encourage the constant addition of content to a site
- Search engines love fresh content and blogs promote that too
- A blog, if named (blog title, sub-head, and posts) configured properly (short permalinks) can own a particular key word/phrase for all search engines
- Search engines love links (inward or outward) and blogs with their blogrolls, links within posts and discussions promote that lots of linkage
There are plenty more good reasons why blogs punch way above their weight when it comes to search engines - please feel free to add more in the comments.
Shemas, if you do a Google search for Shemas Eivers right now, why do you think the top ranking sites are blogs?
I just spent the last 10 minutes trying to leave a comment on Todd Cochrane’s site (Todd is the guy behind GeekNewsCentral).
Todd had a post up today about his Mac and how one of the apps in it hangs from time to time. I wanted to leave a comment about how my Mac crashed once.
The site requires you to have a Typekey account to be able to comment - annoying but I have commented there in the past so not a big deal this time. The site tells me I am logged in so I can go ahead and comment. I type in the comment and click post only to be told I have to supply an url and email address - THERE WAS NOWHERE TO ENTER THAT DATA!
I go back and try again. I look around. Sure enough I am logged into the site. There is nowhere to add in an email address but the site has recognised me (”Thanks for signing in, Tom Raftery. Now you can comment.”). Again I try, again to be shot down.
Ok, I try signing out and signing back in to Typekey - that leads me through a series of screens which would have totally intimidated anyone non-tech.
Finally I arrive back at the post and try to comment once more. Nothing.
There is a message which says:
(If you haven’t left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won’t appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
But I have left comments on the site previously so now I’m not sure whether my comments have been left or not and to be honest I have already spent far too long trying to comment.
Todd, seriously, if you want to hear other people’s opinions, you need to make commenting on your site easier.
UPDATE - D’oh! My comment has now appeared twice on Todd’s post!
According to a report in the New York Times today, Dell is recalling over 4 million laptop batteries because of their propensity to catch fire or explode!
Up to now the advice has been if you think your battery might be one of those likely to catch fire, take it out of the laptop and just use the power cord!
If you have a Dell laptop you can check to see if your battery is affected here.
Blogger is Google’s free hosted blogging platform. Blogger’s steady decline as a blogging platform has been well documented by Blogger users.
Via Marshal Kirkpatrick today comes news that Google have launched (in beta, of course!) a newer version of Blogger. This version has lots of shiny bits such as allowing change of colour of your blog using a WYSIWYG interface:
And it also allows drag and drop manipulation of various aspects of the blog:
The new version requires users to have a Google account which is a bit of a mixed blessing. It also allows for tagging of posts using the Labels field - in fact this is probably the most useful update to the entire application.
Given Google’s lacklustre commitment to Blogger over the last two years and the very little progress in this update I would say to anyone thinking of starting a blog now to stay from Blogger and use the likes of WordPress.com instead. If you are on Blogger - move to a real blog platform. You know you want to.
UPDATE: - for a more comprehensive review of the update see the Google Operating System blog. And Blogger’s official post about it is here
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