More about tables in blogs...

In a recent blog posting about tables in blogs I mentioned that using Google docs was a partial solution, but that it did not seem to allow changes to tables after their creation except by editing the html code directly. After playing around for a bit I have found that I was wrong. Docs does allow table alterations.

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If you highlight a part of the table you want to change - Google docs shows which cell of the table is selected by bounding the left and top of the cell with "" markers, as shown in the screen shot below where I have selected the highlighted cell - you can then go to the “Change” tab – the drop down has several ways of changing the table directly – as shown in the screen shot.

Double click on the image to see it full size

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Using Lightroom to produce image files for blog postings

I have been using Lightroom for a couple of months now and blogging for a few weeks. Being a photographer I want to include images in many of my posts. Before buying Lightroom I would have had to convert the RAW file and process it in Photoshop, but I thought it ought to be easier in Lightroom. So is Lightroom any good for this?

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The short answer is - Yes.

Since I use RAW for nearly all my photography Lightroom allows me to take an unconverted RAW file, adjust it quite well enough for web viewing, then simply export it to a jpeg for uploading. It is quick and easy to do.

I make the adjustments I want to in the Develop module; then from the File drop down menu click on Export (see screen shot below).


Below are my Export settings, saved as a preset for producing blog images.


Most of the options are self-explanatory - My choices that I feel that may need some explanation are:

• jpeg is the obvious format to save the image in and I have found a quality setting of 50% works well enough


• I chose sRGB as the colour space as that is usually the recommended one for web viewing


• I resize the image so that it is quite small, but not tiny with 500 pixels along the short edge


• I set a resolution of 100 pixels per inch - 72 is often recommended, but screens vary and I have seen 100 recommended in preference to 72 by quite a lot of "experts" recently


• I add in a © notice for my pictures - You can set up pretty much whatever you want to say in Lightroom and it puts it in white inside the image, in the bottom left hand corner


• I chose to minimize embedded metadata at I don't see any benefit to including it

That's it - No need to convert to a TIF, or whatever your choice is, process it etc. Even using actions in Photoshop it would take me much longer and the © notice is an extra bonus, which again I can do in Photoshop but it would be a much more involved process.

All-in-all I am pretty happy to use Lightroom to produce images for blog postings from RAW files.

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More about tables & HTML in blogs ...

As I have mentioned before I have had more trouble with getting tables to look right in blog postings than anything else so far. Despite improving things with creating tables in Google docs and pasting the HTML code into the posting I am still having problems and having to do quite a lot of hand corrections.

I recently came across this on-line HTML tutorial on tables, part of a series on HTML programming from the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction, which is the most complete one I have come across so far.

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Creating screen shots for blog postings

For some of the postings I plan to create screen shots of the active windows are pretty much essential. I have never been satisfied with the quality of the output that the simple “PrintScrn” keyboard command produces, so I did a bit of research on the best way to do this with a PC.

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The most useful piece of advice that I came across was to use GIF files as they are both smaller than files like jpegs, but also displayed better quality screen shots than other file formats.

To replace the “PrintScrn” keyboard function I looked around the web and came across a few freeware and paid for screen capture utilities. After several trials and errors I settled on XnView. This is a multi-featured piece of freeware (see licence agreement screen shot below) and amongst the features it offers a screen capture function.


To use the screenshot go to “tools => Capture Screen” (see screen shot below).


This brings up the options of what to capture, how to capture it (hot key or timed), what format in which to save the output and where to save it (see screen shot below).


I tend to use the time lapse method as I have found using hot keys in some applications I have screen shot from respond to pretty much any hot key combination I chose in some unpredictable, and usually unhelpful, way. After the elapsed time a window appears (see screen shot below) offering various settings for the file – I usually use the default setting and just press “OK”. The resultant file sizes tend to be in the 10-30Kb range.


The requisite GIF file appears on my desktop (I used to be a Mac user and I still find the desktop the most intuitive place to put new files before deciding what to do with them) and I can either use it as it is, or crop it down in Photoshop as needed. Then simply upload to the blog posting - easy.
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Inserting tables into blog postings

I wanted to insert a table into the G9 purchase decision posting, but it took me some time to work it out. A blogger help posting eventually showed me how, but I had to work out some things for myself to make it work, and even then it is not quite perfect...

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I tried several HTML editors including Word, but none of them looked anything other than awful in a blog posting.

Someone advised that creating the table using Google document, switching to HTML editing mode and cutting and pasting the code into blogger would work.

It did, after a fashion.

One of the irritations that I have yet to work out is how to get controlled different column widths without editing the % for each cell in the HTML code - I could do it, but for a biggish table it would be very tedious and prone to error, although using a search & replace function in another editor might make it easier. You also have to work out exactly how you want the table to look at the insert stage as it does not seem possible to change the stroke width of the borders etc after insertion, except by directly editing the code again. Read more...

Labels contd..

OK, so the "Adobe Lightroom" label is now showing in the list, but the counter is wrong. Hitting the "Adobe Lightroom" label either in the list or at the end of a post still brings up all of the Lightroom posts. All the labels seem to be affected like this on and off now.

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Not all the labels are showing up...

I have labeled all my posts, but as far as I can see in various forums Blogger has a long term problem with labels coming and going. The "Adobe Lightroom" label is not showing up in the label list - it did a couple of days ago but has now gone missing. Hitting the "Adobe Lightroom" label link below a Lightroom post, however, does bring up the whole lot.

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Adding photos to blogs

Adding photos to blogs is pretty straight forward, but I did learn a few extras to make the final post look the way I wanted it to.

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The Blogger help file gives you the basics, but I found that I wanted to insert four photos into the text and the basic method simply put them at the top of the post. A quick search brought up more help which essentially pointed out that the pictures can be dragged and dropped. I found that cutting and pasting was better as the edit window in Blogger is too small to work in and does not auto scroll when dragging and dropping. All I had to do then was delete the extra blank lines from the top of the post that the upload had created.

When I had done that I found that although I had specified "small" in the layout options they were all slightly different sizes, which made the preview of the post look awful. So I went back to the original thumbnail sized photos and resized them in Photoshop to the same size - I chose 100 x 100 pixels and they now look sensible to my eyes.
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Answer to splitting blog postings

I promised to blog my answer to splitting blog postings earlier. As you can see I have found out how to - I have reedited my first two (longish) postings using this technique and hopefully they show up in the new form.

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How did I do it?

The following help posting on Blogger solved the problem:
http://oeb1.blogspot.com/2007/05/expandable-post-summaries-short-post.html

I followed the instructions to the word and after a bit of tinkering it worked. But I learnt a few things along the way so here are a few extra tips I picked up:

• I used WordPad to edit the template as instructed. I used the search function (ctrl-f) to find the exact strings needed.
  
• You really do have to use some label for each posting or it does not work.
• If you compose your post and then cut and paste it in (as I did for the re-edit) then it is really only possible in "Edit Html" mode. You essentially paste the summary text over the word "Summary" in the template and the body of the post over "More" making sure that all the other Html commands are not overwritten or moved so that they don't work properly.
• Unless you want "more..." to show up as the end of a short post then you do need to add the "~short" label to the post. That brings up the "-end-of-post-" message at the end of the post instead of "more...".
• Just in case the web page is taken down I printed out the instructions in pdf format for safekeeping.
• Sometimes, for no apparent reason, I have found that this does not work properly and the formatting does not look right in the "Summary" part of the post; also, sometimes the "more..." tag has gone missing. After a good deal of trial and error I found that using the "Compose" editor sometimes introduced extra and statements into the post. This confused the issue and I found that searching through the text and removing all of these except the right at the end solved the problem and did not introduce any other problems.
  

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Splitting blog postings

My challenge now is to work out how to split these blog postings so that you don't have to read pages and pages of stuff on topics you are not interested in. I want to work out how to put in a taster paragraph and then put in "Read more..." for those that want to read the whole thing. So far I have found a few web postings telling me how to do this with HTML, but so far none of them have worked. When I work out how it will be obvious from the look of the blog and I'll post my solution. Read more...