Graphs in comments

To insert an image (or graph) in a comment:

1)      Prepare the image. It should be no more than 540 pixels wide so that it will fit into the text column in the centre of the blog window. The file size should be as small as possible.

There is a good free image editing application at www.irfanview.com. Use Image/Resize/Sample.

If shrinking a graph to this size makes it illegible, then see ‘Handleing Large Images’ below.

2)      To use the image in a comment it must be somewhere on the internet so upload it to your website or, if you don’t have one, to Picasa, Flickr or any of he other image hosting sites.

3)      Now go to the comment input box at the bottom of he blog thread that you want to post on.

4)      Click the ‘Img ‘ button in the ‘Comment Quicktags’ toolbar above the comment input window. Entre the URL (address) of the image in the dialog box that appears. Make sure that ‘http://’ only appears once. Copy and paste is usually safest way of doing this.

5)      Click ‘ OK’ and then ‘OK’ again when a second dialog box appears.

6)      Enter the rest of the text for your comment and click ‘Submit’

If you are unsure of what the result will be first time round, then experiment on the ‘Admin’ thread where it doesn’t matter if you make an embarrassing mistake.

If you are using an image that is already in use on another website then get the URL by right clicking on it and then selecting ‘Copy image location’, but remembe to take the size into account. You may be better to download it first.

Handling Large Images

WordPress is quite picky about HTML, in fact it runs on XHTML which is pretty unforgiving. The fact that something works with the operating system and browser that you use does not, unfortunately, mean that it will work for all operating systems and browsers, particularly older ones. For this reason it is advisable to use the ‘img scr =’ tag rather than ‘a href =’, which is really intended for non-image files, even if it works in this case.

If you want to move on to the advanced course, try putting in a thumbnail tag so that when the viewer clicks on the image in the comment they will automatically go to a larger version of the image at another location. A thumbnail would typically be about 150-200 pixels wide.

1) Prepare two versions of the same image, one that will fit in the comment column on the page, and the other larger and more legible.

2) Insert an image tag for the smaller image in a comment in the usual way using the ‘Img’ button.

3) Select the whole of the HTML tag that you have just inserted.

4) CLick the ‘Link’ button in the toolbar and paste in the address for the larger image.

4) Click submit.

You now have an ‘img scr’ tag enclosed in a ‘a href’ tag. When you click the submit button, you should have an image which is a hotlink and clicking on it will take the viewer to the second image.