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A couple of days ago, I was on the phone with a long time BlogHer member and she didn't know that she could post a blog entry on BlogHer. This morning, I opened up my inbox and found two emails from people who wanted to know how they could promote their work on BlogHer. The short answer, "Blog on BlogHer." Their response, "I can do that?"
Yes. Yes you can. And, blogging on BlogHer just got easier for those of you who don't write your own HTML.
Log into BlogHer and click "create content," the purple button in the top right corner of the site. On the next page, click "Blog Entry" to get to the page where you can create your post. Once you're there, you'll see fields where you can write a really great title, select a topic or two that your blog post is related to. These topics "file" your post so that people interested in the same subject can find it in BlogHer's topics and search engine. Don't worry if you want to be a bit more specific than the topics list allows, just scroll down a bit and enter a few more free tags. That way, if we only have "Food & Drink" as a topic but you want to enter "gluten-free" you can.
The last step is to enter the actual post - this is the good part: As of today, you'll not only see an empty text field called "body" where you enter your post - you'll also see helpful buttons to help you. These buttons are part of our brand new WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. This type of editor is also called a "rich text editor" and it will allow you to add rich text elements to your blog post without having to write your own HTML code.
With these buttons, you can create bold text, italicized text, underlined text, strike out text, blockquoted text and lists. You'll also be able to create linked text, insert images (that are already uploaded to the internet) and easily insert youtube video.
Here are some important things to know about BlogHer's rich text editor:
When you're inserting youtube video using the rich text editor, just insert the url of the youtube page. Don't insert the "embed code" that is often provided by youtube.
If you want to insert video from another service, you'll have to click "disable rich text editor" and paste the embed code from the service. Or click the HTML icon and enter the embed code into the post there.
The clipboard icon will open a pop-up clipboard type box that will allow you to paste plain text into your post.
The icon all of the way on the right, with the two boxes, allows you to determine where the teaser break will be. You should be aware that the center advertisement block on BlogHer posts may occasionally over-ride your "break".
And, if you attempt to put more than a couple of paragraphs in the teaser you'll probably come back later to find that I've moved the teaser to shorten your post. The front page is only ((((this long)))) and we need to make sure others have the opportunity to have their posts appear on the landing page of the "all posts" tab, too. Be considerate of your sister BlogHers, please.
When you add an image to your post, you'll enter the url of the image where it lives on another site. If you have an image on flickr, the url will look something like this: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/182/470531828_8378adb675.jpg
but not this:
http://flickr.com/photos/flamingohouse/470531828/in/set-72157600116512761/
You'll be able to select the size you'd like it to be - the default size of the image will appear in the height/width boxes. Don't try to enlarge it, if anything, you'll want to reduce it so that it formats nicely on the page.
You can also select where you want the image to appear - left/right/center etc...
If you'd rather not use the rich text editor because you're copying and pasting full code from another editor or you're writing your own html, please click "disable rich text editor". Enter your post with full code and then click "input format" and select "full html".
These WYSIWYG (rich text editor) tips will also work for comments you leave on BlogHer, in the forums and in your profiles. The WYSIWYG is everywhere you want to
