How-To
This page is to help new users to get to know how to use all of the features of this site. If you print this page you will be able to refer to it the first few times you need to do anything on the site. After you have done things a few times it will be easy to remember.
Features of the site
The features of this site are as follows
- Login Section
- Commenting
- Forums
- Gallery
- Writing posts
This is on the bottom of the sidebar at the right and its use is fairly obvious.
Registered users may comment on any of the posts in these pages. The commenting system also allows you to comment on or reply to a previous comment.
Registered users may add new threads or answer questions or comment on entries in the forums.
Registered users are automatically assigned a home album in the gallery where they can put pictures for others to see.
This part is only of interest to contributors, authors and above. if want to be a contributor, author or an editor or would like to help us moderate the forums please let us know.
How to use the login section
You may have noticed a change in the login section since your last visit. It now contains two text boxes for your user name and password and a link so that new users may register. In addition it doesn’t take you away from the page you are on.
When you first register you will be asked to provide a user name and a valid email address. You will receive an email with an assigned password very soon after you click the button. Use your user name and assigned password to login. After logging in you can choose “Site Admin” from the login section and this will take you to the dashboard.
If you are an author or above you can manage your posts from here by clicking on the relevant links. Normal users won’t have very much to do here but if you click on the profile link at the top of the page you can change your password and enter any other relevant details that you care to add.
To get back to the site from the dashboard pages you simply click the link at the top left named “View Site”
The logout button is self explanatory.
Dead easy!
How to use comments
Posts are the separate items on the page which have individual headlines. They will be shown on the front page, on the categories page and each post has its own individual page which you can get to by clicking on the post’s headline.
To see the comments on any post you can either click on the post’s headline or click on the link below the post which tells you how many comments have been made. In order to add a comment on a post in the site you need to be logged in. To do this you can click on the link below the post “You must be logged in to leave a comment” or you can use the “login” link in the sidebar to the right of the page.
If you are already logged in clicking on the headline of the post will take you to the post’s page and will show the comments that have been made with a text box below where you can add your own comments on the post or previous comments. Comments are threaded so you can comment on, or reply to, other comments. Just click on “Reply ” in the comment that you want to reply to or use the drop down box under the comment editing box to reply to a comment.
If this is the first time that you have made a comment it will not show up until a moderator has approved it. Once you have a comment approved any new comments are automatically added because we trust you. The reason for moderation on the first comment is to prevent “comment SPAM” which would otherwise overrun the site. We wish we didn’t have to do it this way but that is just how things are.
Still pretty easy huh?
How to use the forums
Once again you need to be logged in to post in the forums or even to search the forums. Don’t ask me why you need to be logged in to search, I didn’t design the forums the man with the link at the bottom of the page did and he did a pretty darned good job of it other than that. I am really grateful that he took the time to make the forums so easy to use and there is no way I will ever know enough about PHP to build my own or even custom configure this one. Anyway, registering and logging in is pretty painless and even if you forget the password the login page will help you out by sending a new one to your registration email address.
The forums are threaded which means that related items can be kept together making it easier to follow the trail or thread of the forum. Once you are logged in you can either add a comment or observation to the thread you were looking at or you can click on the forum category that you want to post in and start a new thread. The forum moderators will move any threads that are in the wrong category or, where needed, will start a new category using your thread.
Again, not too hard.
Using the gallery
This is where it gets a little more complex until you have done it a few times. The gallery can be viewed by anybody but only added to by registered users. You do not automatically get gallery priveleges when you first register, this needs to be done by an administrator so may take some time. It may be a day or two depending on where the administrators are working and how busy they are. We try to get to it as quickly as possible.
The gallery display on this site is designed to handle images of 640 x 480 pixels in size. You may upload larger sizes but they will not display well on the page.
Here are the steps you need to take to add items to the gallery.
- Register (if you haven’t already) using the link in the sidebar and then login.
- Go to the gallery page.
- Adding things
You need to do this before going to the gallery page.
Use the menu button at the top to go to the gallery page. Once on the gallery page you will see a link at the top right of the gallery section which is labelled “Your Album”. Click on this link to get to your own album which is automatically assigned when you are given gallery user status. This is the area that you have full control over as a normal user.
Nobody but the administrator can change or delete any of your sub-albums or the pictures in them and they would need to be pretty graphic to be deleted by the admin. Risque, sexy or naughty is quite welcome but we prefer that you you keep the full frontal or “split beaver” shots to yourself or send thumbnails by email for review before you post the pictures.
Click on the “Edit” button at the lower left of the album page. This will open the general tab where you can add a description of your album if you want as well as other changes except those listed below.
- Do not change the name of your main album!Any albums which do not match a user name will be automatically deleted by the administrator.
- Leave the thumbnail size alone! Changing this will screw up the display and people will not want to see your albums.
If you break the rules above your gallery user privilege will be revoked. You can make any other changes you like.
There are two fairly easy ways to add sub-albums and photos to your main album.
- The basic method
- The advanced method
To add a sub-album to your main album click on “Add Album” to the left. Input the name of the album and any other information and save the changes. Make sure that you add 640 by 640 as one of the picture sizes so that the pictures can be displayed in the site. Navigate to your main album and select the new sub-album. Click on add items and a row of text boxes will appear where you can browse to the pictures that you want to upload and add captions for the pictures.
Navigate to your new album and view the pictures.
There is a 2MB limit on the size of individual pictures and an 8MB limit for the whole upload. These limits are per upload, not per album. If your pictures are big you will just have to do more uploads. We do not have any limits on the album sizes but we ask that you keep it reasonable.
Most of your pictures can be cropped or resized to 640 x 480 pixels and will still be usable and much quicker for you to upload. If you want to upload bigger pictures please be considerate and keep them to a maximum of 1024 x 768 or less unless it is a very special picture. If you upload full size pictures from a modern digital camera on a regular basis it will fill up our server space and use up too much of our bandwidth.
If your pictures need to be big for a special reason it will be obvious to the viewer. If you are just too lazy to resize I would suggest you put them on Flickr and not here. If you abuse our site we will revoke your user privileges.
Download the latest version of Picasa free from Google. Install it and let it scour your hard disk for pictures. When it is done you can then browse the thumbnails and select the ones you want. When you click on a thumbnail it will also be shown in the photo tray at the bottom left of the Picasa window.
If you click the hold button to the right of the photo tray a small green spot will appear on the active thumbnails (the tiny ones in the photo tray) and you can then continue to browse other folders and add more to the tray in the same manner.
For multiple thumbnails you can hold down the control key and click on your chosen thumbnails and all of them will appear in the photo tray and clicking the hold button will mark all of the active pictures in the photo tray.
Once you have selected your pictures click on add to new album beside the photo tray. If you have any of the mini thumbnails in the photo tray selected then only the corresponding photos will be added to the new album. To clear the selection click on a blank spot in the photo tray.
You can remove items from the photo tray by selecting them and clicking on the clear button. If no mini thumbnails are selected then the clear button will clear all of the items from the photo tray after you confirm the action.
Once you have made the new album you will see it at the top of the Picasa library bar listed under “albums”. Select your new album there and check the thumbnails to make sure that it contains all the photos you wanted. If you want to add captions double click the first thumbnail and it will open in a larger view and at the bottom you can type in a caption. Use the next and previous buttons to cycle through your pictures until you are satisfied.
Right click on the album name and choose “Export as HTML page” at the bottom of the pop-up list. In the new pop-up menu select the 640 pixels option for size (unless you have a very good reason for bigger sizes) and input the name of your web page. The name will default to the album name so you shouldn’t need to change this. Click next. In the next page it is vital that you select the “XML code” option at the bottom. Click finish.
Navigate to the directory you just saved the file to (the default folder is /My Documents/Picasa HTML Exports) and open the new album’s folder. It should contain two folders, one named “images” and one named “thumbnails” as well as file named “index.xml”. Select all of these and zip them to wherever you like.
To upload this file do the same as for normal photos but when you get to the page where you would normally select individual photos look at the top tabs and select the one marked “From Picasa 2″. Then you can browse to the zip file that you made and upload it. The result will be a new album with the name that you used in Picasa and all of the captions that you added
That wasn’t so bad now was it?
Posting Instructions
- Using the post page in the site admin area
All registered users are now automatically registered as contributors. This means that they can go to “Site Admin” in the login and registration section and they can select the write tab. While you can use the “Visual” style for posts I highly recommend using the “Code” view. The reason for this is that it enables you to use the links to the gallery to insert a picture or a link to an album in the post using the WPG2 button. If you switch from the visual editor to the code box in the posting page WordPress will ruin the formatting of the picture so that you can only have text above and below the thumbnail. To switch to the code editing box completely go to the profile tab at the top. Deselect the “Use the visual editor when writing” option and save the profile.
The WPG2 button will not appear until you enter a title for the post and click on the “save and continue editing button” below the post edit box. Once the WPG2 button is visible you can click on it and a popup window will open with various options for inserting a thumbnail in the post. Use the top part to navigate to the gallery that you want. If you want to link to the whole gallery then you can use the next part to insert the image. Select “float left” or “float right” which mean that the thumbnail will be on the left or right depending on which side you prefer the image to be. If you want to link to an individual picture you can select it from the section below this but be sure that you have chosen float left or right first.
To end a paragraph in the posting box just hit enter twice and this will look fine. You can check how your post will look in the preview below the posting box after you press the “Save and continue editing” button. You may have to scroll down to see the preview.
- Using Windows Live Writer
An easy way to write an article and submit it is to use Windows Live Writer which is available as a free download from Microsoft by clicking on the link below and following it to the download.
While installing it (it comes as an .msi package) you should choose to also install the Windows Live Toolbar in Internet Explorer. This will allow you to see something on a web page and choose “Blog It” from the Live Writer toolbar and it will open the program with the heading already filled in and with a link to the page below that. Firefox users can add an extension called “Live Writerfox” which works even better from Firefox. In Firefox you can right click and choose
Once you have installed the program you will need to put in the Weblog address (http://www.seismictalk.com) and your user name and password. If it doesn’t ask you for this automatically you can choose Weblog from the menu bar at the top and then select Add Weblog Account.
The program will then try to download the Weblog settings so that it can display the post you are writing in the same format that you will see it when it is published. If this doesn’t work the first time try again, sometimes it may get a slow connection and fail. Once you have set it up it is all WYSIWYG and includes spell checking.
You can copy and paste a picture from a web page and then format the picture the way you would in Word. Click on the picture and select right or left alignment in the bar on the right and you can also select the size (make sure you keep it at 540 pixels wide or less otherwise it won’t fit in the site) and can choose to have it link to the full size picture, the web page or nothing at all. You can also add a margin around the picture so that the text is not too close.
When you are done you can preview the post by switching from “Web Layout” to “Web Preview” and then, if you are a normal contributor, choose “Save Draft to Weblog” by pressing the little arrow beside the Publish button or if you are an author or editor you can just press “Publish”.
Any contributors who have made three usable posts to the site will be upgraded to Author status after which you will immediately be able to see the results on the site. Those who are new will have to wait until the post has been checked and approved by an editor before it will show up.
Posting Guidelines
We will publish anything that you send as long as it may be of interest to our readers. We will check for any crude language and edit anything really offensive but mostly we will let the small shit through. We will also check for really bad spelling and grammar but as long as it is understandable, who really cares? So go ahead, what are you waiting for? If you think that a couple of guys can add enough stuff to keep everybody’s interest up in the site you are sadly mistaken.
We all have day jobs, just like you, on top of our other bad habits. Especially Larry.
The comments below are so that you can ask for clarification on anything in this pile of gobbledygook that is not clear. We will try to answer as soon as we can.
