Backlinks ...

From: Lee
To: Terry Fletcher; David McMahon
Subject: Backlinks ...

Hi Terry

I came over here at David's suggestion. He wrote a post asking for responses on our own blogs and also asking for backlinks. I responded but when I read the description of how to do a backlink on New Blogger it made absolutely no sense. I do have them enabled. We were wondering if you could explain how they happen and work.

Things I don't understand are which end to start from and how to make it happen in the post, if that is even possible.

Thanks & Peace!

Lee

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I've never used the "Backlinks" feature in NEW-Blogger, but I couldn't see what the problem could be. So I decided to find a post and link to it. This has got to be an easy one, yeah?

Hmmmm... Bummer!

Tried it FROM; tried it TO; tried it OLD; tried it NEW (hey, that rhymes!). No way, Jose. All I got was a 'New Post' on my Blog, and that wasn't what I, or Lee, or David, wanted. Time to start hunting for a solution from the Guru's on the web. Much good stuff out there, but it all seemed to fall into the usual 'techy-trap' of assuming that everybody knew the basics. They also seemed to concentrate on the "NEW-Blogger Beta", which I assume is when the feature first surfaced. Nada, nada, nada about the current NEW-Blogger that we are all using.

Other, real-life matters intruded, and since time was obviously of the essence I emailed Lee and David and grudgingly admitted defeat. But I promised to continue investigating. As I said in a previous post, "You win some; you lose some!", but it shouldn't be that way. Help should be easily available and just as easily understood.

There is a happy ending, though. More information in the next post ...

 

TIP - Copyright . . . (for Cecilia's picture © info)

Cecilia asked about placing copyright information below a picture, possibly in a different font and colour so that it did not merge with the text of the post. My response was that she should highlight the copyright text and then select to 'center' it after choosing the 'font', its 'color' and its 'size'.

She managed this pretty easily when she elected to have the photograph showing in the middle of the page; the copyright caption just became another line of text, centred under the photograph! But when she tried that with a pic aligned to the left of the text, everything went 'pear-shaped'. And I suspect that exactly the same problem will occur if the pic is aligned to the right of the text.

Hmmmmm! Time to revisit the problem.

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Photograph: © Cecilia Mercado

Much research of Blogger Help lines uncovered the fact that the new Blogger engine does NOT support captioning of pictures so, to get the effect, one has to 'fiddle' with the template HTML and the post AFTER you've uploaded the picture and saved the post, as a Draft, so that you can return to it and edit the HTML. No need to throw your hands up in horror. It really is a simple exercise!

In the next post I will walk you through the procedure. However, until I have managed to get comprehensive screenshots of each step I will try not to post anything that ends up confusing the reader. I will also try to add 'plain-text' code that needs to replace what Blogger produces so that you can literally copy/paste the 'edits'.

Stay tuned!