Bob’s Guide to editing your own blogs

This guide is intended to help new contributors who haven’t used the WordPress blog editing interface before.  Here, I’ll run through some of the tools at your disposal when writing/editing blogs, most importantly I’ll explain a way to add pics to your blog posts.

First things first, after you login and reach the Dashboard click on ‘New Post’ if you’re creating a new blog post or click on ‘edit’ if you want to edit one of your existing posts or drafts.

The next screen will then pop-up, some of there options will not be available for contributors.

There’s a lot of tools you can use to edit your post, if you’ve used any word processing software before these should be pretty familiar.   You can pick a category for your post, just check the box(es) that apply.  If you want to save your work for later, press the ’save as draft’ button (there’s also an auto-save feature which will save periodically).  If you’ve finished your blog post and want to submit it for publishing, press the ’submit for review’ button (for contributors); if you’re an author it’ll say ‘publish.’

Adding pics:

If you’re a contributor, unfortunately you can’t directly upload pics onto the blog; this is something built into WordPress so I can’t change it.  However there’s a way around this.

Uploading Pics to Photobucket

This example is for the Photobucket.com website, but similar steps can be done with sites like Imageshack. First, you’ll need a free account with Photobucket.  Once you login, you can upload a pic from your computer. After that’s done, the thumbnail of your pic should be displayed, click on the code next to HTML CODE and copy it.

Now go back to your blog post, hit the HTML tab and paste in the code. It should look something like this.

Now click on the ‘Visual’ tab (next to HTML tab) and you should see the picture inside your post. You can then drag around the pic to wherever you want it placed.