Common problems and solutions (inlcuding posting photos!)
Now that you're online and have acquired a basic knowledge of how to use Motime to create and maintain your web logs, you may have some nagging doubts or recurring problems that you would like to solve.
This chapter is designed to help you through the most common problems and fixes as "painlessly" and as quickly as possible.How to insert images in your blog
This is probably the most frequently asked question of all time!
The solution is not difficult, but you must have access to a webserver and know how to use FTP (file transfer protocol). If you've got both, the rest is relatively straightforward.
If you lack access to a webserver, you cannot place images on your blog at this time.
Click here for free hosted webserver space: free web servers but there are many that will not serve photos to web pages to your blog, so you may need to experiment. As of this writing, Photobucket is one free service that works well for this purpose. Photobucket offers a free and even easier and faster photo hosting site called Tinypic. Check it out, it's great.
1) Using your preferred graphics application (such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Flash) create your web-optimized graphic element, making a note of its dimension in pixels. For the purpose of this example, let's suppose that the name of the graphic element is "picture.jpg", 100 pixels wide and 50 pixels high.
2) Upload the image to a directory on your webserver, in this case let's just say that you have put it on: http://www.yourwebsite.com in the directory called images.
3) If you are using the Windows operating system and IE Explorer version 5.5 or later, you can insert the image into your blog using the control panel interface by clicking on the Insert Image icon and then entering the URL of the image in the indicated field and clicking OK. Otherwise, if you know basic html, you can place the image in the template or within a post, as you wish. In the case of our example, here's is what the tag should look like:
<IMG SRC="http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/picture.jpg" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=50>
You may place the image tag in the HTML of your template (accessed by clicking on the manage template link in the top menu bar) or in the text editor of your post.
To understand how to align your images on the page and in relation to any text that you place next to it, check out this link.
If you follow all the above instructions and your images still don't appear, it is very likely that the free server that you have chosen does not allow the posting of images off-site.
Formatting images with adjacent text
You can control the distance between images and text by using the tags HPACE and VSPACE.
Using these two attributes you can define the distance in pixels between the images and surrounding text.
HSPACE defines the horizontal distances to the left and right of the image with respect to whatever other elements it is next to.
VSPACE defines the vertical distances to the top and bottom of the image with respect to whatever other elements it is next to.
This is the correct syntax:
<IMG SRC="immagine.gif" WIDTH=178 HEIGHT=180 BORDER=2 VSPACE=3 HSPACE=3>
How to edit or delete a published post
If you're not happy with what you have written, you can easily update or delete any post.
ou must first be logged on with your username and password. Then all you have to do is go to the Blogs->Edit Blog->Post panel of your blog by clicking on its link from the Quick Launch page. You can see your blog entries in the preview pane below the post editor. Navigate to the post that you want to update and delete in the preview pane, find the update or delete button which you see on top of each post and click the appropriate one.
If you are updating, the content of your original post will appear in the text editor ready to be modified. Simply make whatever changes you want, and click the publish post button to update your post. That's it.
If you are deleting, after you click the OK button on the pop-up, the post is deleted and your task is completed.
Adding background music to your blog
In order to play background music on your blog, you need to make sure that the music file itself is hosted on a server connected to the Internet, and you must know the full URL, for example: http://www.musicfile.com/musicfile.wav
The file can be in midi, wav, mp3, wmv or other commonly compatible formats.
You must then open your template code and place an "embed" tag in your template code. It is explained in detail on this site:
http://www.pageresource.com/html/embed.htm
Please let us know if this link no longer works, thanks.
You don't see the editor's toolbar in the control panel?
The WYSIWYG HTML text editor* for your blog currently works in Windows and IE Explorer 5.5 and later, and on the Macintosh and Linux systems on Mozilla and Firefox.
It does not work with Safari, Opera or other browsers.
Write a question to the help blog if you are using a compatible system, but still do not see the editor.
*An acronym meaning "what you see is what you get". In this case it means an interface that looks like a word processor, with buttons for Bold and Italic, text color and other formatting options.
Inserting an "Add to favorites" link
In order to let your readers add your blog to their list of favorite sites in Explorer (also called "bookmarking"), simply add the correct code to the <head> section of your template, anywhere in between these elements:
<HEAD></HEAD>
This is the code to paste into your template:
<script language="JavaScript1.2">
var bookmarkurl="http://yourblog.motime.com"
var bookmarktitle="blogname"
function addbookmark(){
if (document.all)
window.external.AddFavorite(bookmarkurl,bookmarktitle)
}
</script>
You should enter the name of your blog as you would like it to appear in the list of favorites, even if it differs from your actual Web address, but the URL in the http string must be exact.
Finally, paste the following tag into the place on your template where you would like the "Add to favorites" link to appear:
<a>Add<acronym title="HyperText Markup Language">blogname</acronym> to my favorites<br></a>
How to link to something on the same page
Sometimes, on longer pages which require scrolling to read all of the text, you may wish to place a link which refers to another place on the same page.
We will use the standard link tag, <A>, in a slightly different way. We will create an "anchor" in the place that you want to link to, and then a simple <A> link which refers to it.
1) To create the anchor (the destination for the link), place the following tag around the text or image that you wish to link to:
<A NAME="anchorname">destination_text_or_image</A>
In the above example "anchorname" is the name of the anchor (and will be invisible on the blog), and "destination_text_or_image" is the exact location that you are guiding your reader to.
2) To create the link, place this tag around the text or image that you want to become clickable link:
<A HREF="#anchorname">Go to destination</A>
That's all there is to it. Try it!
How to create link descriptions on "mouseovers"
It is often useful to place brief descriptions, which appear when you pass over the link with your mouse, within your links.
To do so is relatively easy. When you create the HTML tag for the link, you simply add a Title "attribute". Here is the format of the link tag with a description included. (The Title attribute is in bold for emphasis.):
<A HREF="www.motime.com" title="Motime: Create your own web log in 5 minutes and publish your thoughts to the world!"><b>Motime!</b></A>
And here is what it looks like after it is pasted into a post or template. Hold your mouse over the link for a second to see the descriptive text:
Motime!
Cool, huh?