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 - Alternative Displays

This is an alternative display, using "Thickbox", for a series of small thumbnails that, when clicked, will take the viewer to a 'Gallery' display without actually leaving the page.

If the "Thickbox" script works as it should, you will be served up a larger image, superimposed on this page, and you will see 'navigation' links from one picture to another. What more can you ask for?

The following series of pictures are of some very attractive young ladies that 'T3 Magazine' uses to advertise their electronic goods. You have to look closely to actually see the electronic items in question (for instance, the fashionable pelmet that girl #8 is wearing detracts somewhat!), but that's OK, because I'm not really advertising for them.

So, here goes!

  

  

  

I have to strongly emphasise that the series of pics above are not 'sexist' in any way; they were used because they were a convenient 'series' available on my hard drive. Oh, okay, and for a bit of entertainment for the lecherous old men that might visit this page. (see the comment by Anonymous)

That's the end of the demo. You should now have a clearer idea about what you can accomplish on your Blog. Whether it is an 'iBlogger', 'Wordpress' (Wordpress has it built in as a plugin!), or any other.

In line with David McMahon's philosophy of trying to help as many interested bloggers as possible, I am more than willing to help, either here or one-on-one, anybody that asks. If I find that several 'peeps' ask the same question I may resort to using this medium to provide a full explanation so that bloggers can drop by and pick the ideas they wish to use.

Happy Blogging!

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!