Tales From the Minivan

I’m was very happy to see some great new St Patty’s Day Smileboxes added! Here’s one that I created in less than 5 minutes from last years’ celebrations!

Make a free ecard - it’s easy!

A photo really does say a 1000 words, and if you are a Blogger a photo can really help to get your story across. Statistics say that Blogs with photos have higher readership!

Here’s a few pointers on how to get photos easily onto your CPO Blogs!

First and foremost is resizing! If a photo is too large it will look distorted. We recommend a width of 400 pixels as the maximum width.

Here’s an example of a photo that has not been resized:

Here is the same photo resized to 400 pixels wide:

How do I resize my Photos?

Many online photo hosting sites allow you to resize you photos there, but with some of them you will be limited to their default sizes. (***Photobucket, now has custom resizing capabilities now!***) If you’d like to resize to a specific size I’d recommend using a Windows XP add-on called Image Resizer
Once installed it allows you to right click on any photo and choose “Resize Pictures” you can then customize to the size you want.

How do I add a photo to my Blog entries?

Now that you have your photos resized appropriately you’ll need to upload them to a photo hosting site. There are many of them online, Flickr, Image Shack and Photobucket are the most common and easy to use. Sign up for a free account and upload your resized photos from your computer to the site. Doing this will assign a URL (a www address) to your photos. I know many of you are familiar with adding photos to your signatures and posts on our Message Boards, adding a photo to your Blog entry is just as easy, but differs a little. Instead of using the [IMG] code you’ll just need the direct link code. A quick way to get this is to right click on the photo and select “Properties” and highlight and copy the URL for the Image Location.

Once you have your photo and your URL, to get the photo into your Blog entry you’ll see some tools just above your new post text box. Click on the “Insert Image” it’s the small icon that looks like a tree. Once it has been selected you can paste in the URL of your photo then select “insert”.

It’s as simple as that! If you have any questions feel free to comment below!