This is your “how to” page.

Images

You seem to have worked that out. I don’t know whether it was you or the site itself responsible, but you were getting something of the form: [a href="somelocation"] [img src="imagelocation.jpg" height="xx" width = "yy" ... /][/a] (Where I use ‘[' and ']‘, substitute ‘<’ and ‘>’.) A lot of that is unnecessary. The ‘a’ means ‘anchor’; the ‘href’ is ‘horizontal reference’. If you wanted the picture to link somewhere, this is how you’d do it. So, when I posted Wicket in the forums, it would’ve looked like this here: [a href="http://radioclare.com"] [img src="address/images/wicket.jpg" height="243" width="160" /][/a]

In here though, you don’t need to worry about it. It’s just bloated code, so I’d delete the ‘anchor’ parts, unless you want to link to some destination. (I’m pretty sure that the code appears because you select “file” or “page” on the “Link to:” option. Just select “none” and it’s sorted.)

Aligning

Just what you were after This is straightforward. However, it’s a little different to the “obvious” way of doing it. Instead of clicking on the alignment buttons (which put “align=left” etc in the coding), you’re going to have to do things a different way, if you want the text to wrap. The normal code for an image is: [img src="imagelocation.jpg" height="x" width="x" ... /] The way to read that out loud is “Start image. The Source is “imagelocation.jpg”.

We’re going to redo things.

In effect, you’ll now be saying: “Start image. Apply some attributes to that image, that I’ve stored elsewhere. We want this image to use the attributes that I’ve called ‘leftalign’. The Source is … ”

This “leftalign” thing is shorthand for “Put the image on the left of the screen. Have the text wrap around it. Tell it to leave a gap of ten pixels from the edge of the image to the side of the text.” Now, if you wanted the computer to know the height and width of the image, you’d write those words it knows out, and put the details in quotation marks.

For example: height="the height goes here" width="the width goes here"

Just as the computer recognises what ‘height’ and ‘width’ means, so it does something else. In this case, it’s the word ‘class’. So, what you would do now is manually insert the command telling it what class to apply. In the case of left-aligning, the code would now read: [img class="alignleft" src="imagelocation.jpg" ... /]

And it’s as easy as that.

The options you have to hand are “alignleft”, “alignright”, and “centered”. If you don’t wish there to be any wrapping, don’t include a ‘class’: you’re free to leave it empty, which will align to the left as a default, or specify “center” and “right” as you already knew how to do.

Ordering Your Pages

When writing/editing a page, there’s an option on the right titled “page order”. You can define where it is to go in there. BUT: Choosing a number won’t automatically adjust the numbers of all the pages that follow it. You could end up with a dozen page ones, arranged in alphabetical order/by date etc. To change all of the pages’ orders, go to Manage > Pages and then edit them individually.

Deciding which pages appear under your “About” heading

There are different ways of going about this. The default is to show all. Although it’s possible to list those you wish to exclude, I’ve not chosen to take this approach. The reason is that more and more of the posts that you write are going to be ones you wish to exclude, so it makes sense to me to have the default excluding ALL of them, and then you allow the odd one to show. You’re going to need to mess around with the PHP here It’s really, really easy. Go to Presentation > Theme Editor Open “sidebar.php” Deep in that mess lies a little bit of code that you need to amend. I’ve signposted it for you. Just search for your name and you’ll come to a bit marked ” ” Under that, you see:

Those numbers 26, 2, 23, and 8 are the page IDs of the pages that are visible. Every time you want to add a new one, write the page, publish it, then get its ID number from Manage > Pages. Then all you have to do is add the number. So, if you wish to publish a page with the ID 95, your code would be amended to include 95.

Easy

Extra info added 24/06/08 re adding captions to pictures…

Title normally does something different in certain browsers (shows you some text when you hover over the image), but with a little bit of trickery, it’s been changed to bring up a caption

It brings a problem with it that we’ll have to bear in mind though. The width of your page is 550 pixels. If an image is wider, the blog resizes it so it fits. If you use the caption, the image isn’t resized and the caption goes along with it.

This isn’t a problem: I’ve manually resized the images so they’re 550, I just have to remember that for future reference.

Something else for your help page: There’s a problem when you do the alignleft thing and then throw in another image: The blog doesn’t realise that you want the next block of text to start level with the new image. Instead, it starts a new paragraph until the space is filled, meaning that your new paragraph appears earlier than you expected, and then fills out the remaining space until your new image arrives. It doesn’t have to be bad: On [url=http://www.meddysong.com/2008/06/rittering-on-about-sporty-chocolate/#more-45]this page[/url], my layout looks very good for it.

It didn’t look good on yours though. By the top picture was the line “Even if you’re not a fan of ducks” ten the pic came (which was too wide to have the text continue at the side” then came “you must admit these ducks are …”

The only way I could think of solving that problem was to add a transparent image after the first paragraph, stretch it out till it reached the second image, then go from there.

You can do this yourself if need be. Just enter the image “/image/spacer.gif” and then give it a relevant height attribute. In your case, 60 pixels worked, so I entered

Getting the right height is trial and error, I’m sorry to say