This is not intended to replace whatever documentation is available from Radio Userland (though frankly I think it could be needed). I wrote the below as emails to a friend who started a blog, and asked me to explain how to use images with Radio Userland. I got the same question from a number of people, and ended up forwarding the same email to many people.
The sensible thing to do was to put the little how-to text out on my blog.
Using external images in your blog
To use an image from anywhere (or, almost anywhere) on the Net, all you have to do is right-mouse-click on the image, select "copy", and "paste" it into the wysiwyg text box in your Radio page.
When you copy a picture from another web site to add it to your blog, it will appear in your blog entry more or less as it does on the original site. That is, it will aligned left, right, with or withour border, etc, as it was originally. That may not be what you want. Especially, you may want a picture to be aligned right (or left) while your text is flowing around it, instead of appearing above or under the text.
It's quite easy to control the placement of the picture.
You have noticed that there are "radio buttons" under the text boxs saying "source" or "wysiwyg". Normally you can do everything in "wysiwyg mode". In this case, however, you must use the source (that is, html) mode. Don't be scared. It is easy.
When you have added your picture, and it does not behave as you want it to, switch to source/html mode.
Inside the box, you will notice an html IMG "tag" referring to the picture. It looks like this:
There may be other text inside the IMG tag as well; just leave it as it is. No problem. To make the picture align right, ad one ALIGN= entry, so it looks like this:
Then you switch back to wysiwyg view, and you will see the picture behaving as it should. As I said, the other identifiers inside the tag (typically WIDTH=, HEIGHT=, BORDER= etc) can be left alone. But knowing about the ALIGN statement will be very useful for formatting blog entries properly.
How to upload your own pictures to your blog
On the page where you create blog entries (which runs off your own PC in a normal browser window; http://127.0.0.1:5335/ ), along the right hand side of the screen (a bit down) you should find the entry "My Pictures" and it may say "disabled" or "enabled". Click that link, which will take you to the page http://127.0.0.1:5335/myPictures/
This is where you set up this tool so it will automatically put the images you want to use into your blog.
There is a check box which is labeled "Check this box to enable the My Pictures tool" and this should be checked (on).
Below the checkbox, there are three text boxes.
For the first text box, create a new, empty folder somewhere on your disk. You do this the normal way with Windows Explorer. I am using
C:\Pictures\Radio Upstream\
but you can really use whatever specific folder you want. Just remember where it was ;)
In the second textbox you put the name of another folder (or directory). This is the place on your disk where Radio Userland (the blog software) puts the files that it "upstreams", or copies, to your blog. Typically, this will be:
C:\Program Files\Radio UserLand\www\images\
Note that this directory should already exist on your system. You have to find it. You don't really have to care about its contents; that is handled automatically. Don't even think about messing with the files in there carelessly, it is actually your blog, or what becomes your blog when Radio upstreams it.
The third, larger textbox, you can leave alone for now. It should contain valid html code to format whatever picture you want to use for your blog. Feel free to play with it when you feel adventurous; but not now.
There is a checkbox named "Check this box to copy the generated HTML text to the system clipboard." that you can really leave whatever you want for the purpose of this short how-to. I have left it unchecked.
Now click Submit and you should be ready to go.
The "My Pictures" tool is now activated and will be running as long as you have the Radio Userland application running on your computer.
Now, here is the imporant part. You want to use an image you have on your PC in a blog entry. Don't write the blog entry yet. In fact, when you use this tool, it will take control of whatever browser window it wants, and use that for putting your image into a new blog entry, so the safe thing is to have one window open, and let that be the one you use for writing your blog.
In Explorer (normal explorer; not IE), copy the image file into the folder you first named (in my case C:\Pictures\Radio Upstream\). You can copy using drag or drop or whatever. Once the file is in there, the "My Pictures" tool grabs it and moves it to the second folder you named, in fact creating a new folder structure under it based on today's date (but you don't need to be concerned with that). It will then, assuming you are online, "upstream" the picture to the blog server (on the Net), and after some seconds (be very patient here), the IE browser window will change, and it will propose a new web entry containing the picture you have uploaded.
Write whatever text you want around this picture, format it and click "Post to Weblog" in the normal way. Your image is blogged!
You may feel like finding your picture on your blog manually. That is not too difficult.
Say you upload a picture today, November 18, 2002. The picture will be found on the following URL:
where 000XXXX is the number of your blog, and "mypicturefile.jpg" is the name of your image file. You can copy and paste this image as normal into your blog entries, or send the url to your friends or post it to message boards or whatever.
You can copy many images to your blog at the same time. You may, however, find that the result is messy and will require a lot of manual formatting.
A bit of a warning: We have 40Mb each to use on Salon's blog server. That is a hell of a lot of text. It is not a hell of a lot of images!
Also, large pictures will look very bad on your blog. In fact, it will only look good with rather small pictures. So scale your pictures wisely before uploading them to your blog, or you will mess up your whole blog frontpage badly.
Be aware that once you have uploaded your image to the blog, you cannot on the same day upload an edited version of the same image, with the same name, to your blog. You will have to rename it first, like "myimage2.jpg" and upload it again, and change your references.
Note: As a kind reader comment informed me, to delete an uploaded image from the server, just delete the file from the corresponding folder on your disk, in the C:/Radio UserLand/www... structure. UserLand should delete it from the server automagically.
