Yesterdays WordPress demonstration went very well. We filled the room.
Canadian Energy Issues
Steve Aplin did a brief presentation on how his blog has impacted his interests. He mentioned that it lead him to many new connections and opportunities. He also showed a custom plugin that he added to show Ontario’s energy production and CO2 production.
Inserting images in your blog
I did a presentation on how to insert images.
-The use of eye-fi cards in cameras. This isn’t necessary but it’s a great convenience to have your pictures automatically transferred to your computer. It also can clear the camera’s memory as it transfers so it gives the appearance of an infinite camera memory.
-Re-sizing images with Gimp. Gimp can also be used to remove red-eye, crop, change brightness, contrast and many other types of image editing. I showed how to drag and drop images onto Gimp to save steps.
-Re-sizing images with Image Resizer. This is a cool drag and drop tool for shrinking images for insertion into your blog. I have version 5 and I noticed the site has version 6. I’ve not tried version 6 yet.
-Adding pictures to a post using the built in WordPress image uploader.
-Adding pictures to a post using “Faster Image Insert” plugin.
We also talked about a few other things such as how to insert a video from TED.com or youtube.com. In a nutshell you visit the video in it’s repository and click the share or embed button in the video. You will be given an embed code that you can paste into your page or post. You need to switch the edit session to HTML view (instead of Visual view). You can change back to Visual view once you’ve pasted.
Backing up came up as well. One way is to go to Tools/Export in the WordPress Dashboard. This only backs up your text data content. You must also back up the file system that contains all your images. You can use FTP or SSH for that. I’ve been using WinSCP which should work for both FTP and SSH.
There are a lot of people in our group that don’t have a blog yet or need help so I have booked two “Ask the WordPress Expert” sessions where I will not give a specific presentation but instead we can help people with their questions.
Some of us went for an after-social at the Highlander.
