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March 29, 2006

Linking to to external images in blog entries

One of the technical issues people have experienced with the U of S blog system is that once you upload images to the system, you cannot remove them from the system. One of the workarounds for this issue is link to images you have stored elsewhere on the Web from within your blog entries. The following are some instructions for how to do this....

These instructions assume that you have the following:

1. An account on the campus student webserver, http://homepage.usask.ca.
2. Access to your account on Homepage via the My Files channel in PAWS (usually you will find this channel in your Home tab in PAWS)


Step 1 - Upload the image you want to display in your blog to your account on HomePage.

To do this, click on the Homepage link in the My Files channel (see the red rectangle in the graphic above). The Homepage File Manager window will appear. Scroll down to the bottom of the window, and you will see some buttons that look like the ones highlighted in the graphic below:

Click the Browse button to locate the file you want to upload from your computer to Homepage. Once you have navigated to that file and selected it, click Upload. The File Manager will return the following response:




Step 2 - Link from within your blog entry to the file you just uploaded to homepage

To do this, you need to know two things: the web address of where your file now lives, and the HTML tag used to insert an image into a web page.

The web address of the file you just uploaded will be something like this:

http://homepage.usask.ca/abc123/yourimage.jpg

where http://homepage.usask.ca is the web address of the Homepage server, abc123 is your NSID, and yourimage.jpg is the name of the image you uploaded.

You can test out whether uploading worked properly by opening a new web browser window and trying to go to that location. If you see the image displayed in the browser window, your upload worked (YAY!)...


The HTML tag you need to use is the

<img src="">

which tells your web browser to insert an image at this spot. The location of the image to insert is given between the quotation marks.

So....

the full HTML tag would look like this:

<img src="http://homepage.usask.ca/abc123/yourimage.jpg">

Place this tag wherever you want the image to appear in your blog entry....

Posted by tbb153 at 03:31 PM     Topic(s): HowTo

March 28, 2006

Using Apple's Safari browser with blogs.usask.ca

While Apple's Safari web browser does generally work with Movable Type 3.2, there ARE a number of small, specific issues with it that Mac users need to keep in mind...

First, the editing buttons (used for formatting your entry body and extended entry) do not work within Safari, and are in fact removed from the Entry page if Movable Type detects that you are using Safari. You CAN still format blog entries with Safari, but you have to put the HTML codes in by hand.

Second, when you make a change, rebuild your site, then view it again, often Safari redisplays the previous, unchanged page again. To accurately display the changes you have made to your site, you may need to empty your Safari web cache. You can do this by going to the Safari menu and choosing Empty Cache, or by using the shortcut key combination option-command-E. Once you view your site again, it should reflect the changes you have madew.

Posted by tbb153 at 09:04 AM     Topic(s): Troubleshooting

March 21, 2006

Blog Upgrade on March 21 - complete

We have upgraded our blog server to Movable Type 3.2.

You can find a full description of what's changed in version 3.2 of Movable Type by reading the ChangeLog section of the Movable Type manual:

http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/3.2/h_changelog/#entry-5869

Briefly, though, here are a few notable changes:

If you run into any problems as a result of the upgrade, please contact blog_support@usask.ca.

Posted by kvl014 at 10:25 AM     Topic(s): News and Notes