Tech Tips

Don’t Panic

Alan Levine, 50 Tools to Tell a Story

Pasting from Word: Some of you mentioned problems in cutting and pasting from Word. If you choose the clipboard icon with a W on it from the formatting bar, a window will pop up that you can paste your Word document into. It strips all the formatting. This doesn’t solve the paragraph break problem, but it does solve the problem some were having of having all the formatting code show up within the post.

N.B. re: Hannah’s question: You can put tags in your comments by using html code. For example, writing <a href=url>title</a> will create a live link.

New: Using the “More” tag: In order to make room for more posts on the front page, we’d like to encourage you to to use the more tag. To do so, simply insert the more tag after a couple of sentences by clicking the more tag icon (looks like a page break; between the break link and spell check icon).

The Articles of Interest sidebar can be added to using a del.icio.us tag. In order to do so, you’ll need to sign up for an account. Once you have an account, it’s easiest to install the bookmarklet. Then, you can bookmark it using the tag “genderandtech09” and it will magically appear here on the blog.

Update! If you want an image to show up next to your comments, go to gravatar.com and sign up for an account. You’ll be asked to upload a photo. You can register multiple email addresses and any blog (like this one) that uses the service to display photos with comments will pull your photo. You can use a real photo or a fake one (like a South Park version of yourself or something). Try it!

Here are some how tos that might help you as you make your posts and write your papers. This will allow you to have richer posts that include links, images and even video.

1. Adding a link

• First, find the page you want to link to, then highlight the url and copy it (ctrl-c for pc; command-c for mac)
• Then, highlight the text in the post that you want to serve as the link text (the title of the article or something).
• Click the link icon in the formatting bar at the top of the post text box.
• A box will appear that allows you to paste the link in. Paste the link in the “link url” box. You can ignore the other boxes.
• Click insert and you’re done!

2. Adding images.

• Either have the url for the image that you want to include or have an image on your computer ready to go.
• Click the star next to Add Media:
• If you’re uploading an image, click the Choose File to Upload button.
• After selecting the file, write in a you can choose options such aligning it to the left or right or resizing it.
• If you’re adding a link to a picture, you’ll need to switch to html mode by clicking the html tab in the upper right-hand corner of the post box.
• Enter the url for the image in the pop-up box. Enter the description in the next pop-up box.
• Switch back to visual mode to see the results. Clicking on the image and then the “edit image” icon gives you more options.
• You can add a caption or change the alignment. Click update to change the image.

Adding video

• Although you can upload video just like images, we’re not recommending it since we have some space constraints on this blog site. So, if you make your own video, just upload it to YouTube first and then follow the directions below.
• Switch to html mode.
• On the YouTube (or other video sharing site) page, copy the embed code.
• Paste the embed code into the post. Voila! Video!