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How To Guide: Adding Media to Your Blogs (WordPress Tutorial)
Written by Hannah
Another mini tutorial in using WordPress, Abubilla style, for our Voices lot (or anyone else). Here’s how we like to add our pictures, songs and videos..
Images:
So, you write your blog. Let’s say this time it’s about your love of Laura Marling (well, I can’t blame you), and you come to a point you think would be best illustrated by a picture: Laura Marling is so ridiculously young, how can she possibly write such good music? Here is a picture of Laura looking really young:
Open yourself up another tab/window with the internet, Google search Laura Marling and click images (this is, of course, if you don’t already have a file on your computer with pictures of Laura Marling – I hope you don’t, unless you’re a friend, or something). There you will see a whole selection of pictures of the girl looking wounded and vulnerable. Click on the one you think most highlights this and save it. (your Desktop’s as good a place as any, because then you’ll remember to delete it later…).
Go back to your blog. Above the tool bar you will see “Upload/Insert” with a little icon next to it. Click on it. Upload your image. After a bit, a ‘Gallery’ tab should appear at the top, where there was no gallery tab before. Go to the gallery, and you will see your picture. Click on ‘Show’ and a drop down form will appear. You can edit the information of your image here (have a play around, and see what boxes effect how your image is displayed).
Only use jpegs. It is important that the dimesions of your image are no larger than 900 x 550 (pixels), because otherwise it may not fit on some computer screens. Once you have edited the picture as you want it, you can then click ‘Insert into post’, like this (I have selected the ‘Medium’ option, and ‘Centre’ on alignment – play around with this):
Or, if you have a selection of images (in this case of Noah and the Whale, Johnny Flynn, Laura AND Mumford and Sons) that you’d like to appear in a gallery (much more attractive), you can keep uploading all your images, edit them as described above, and then click ‘insert gallery’ when you want your gallery to appear:
The gallery will appear as a bluey box on your blog. And then go ahead and publish!
Okay so now videos:
Start by writing your blog in WordPress; let’s say it’s about Mumford & Sons for the sake of argument: write write write bla bla bla very good very good.
Now you want to add a video. Above the tool bar, you will see two tabs (right hand side): ‘Visual’ and ‘HTML’. WordPress automatically chooses the ‘Visual’ layout, so you can see more or less how your blog is going to look. But to embed a video, you need to select the ‘HTML’ tab.
Now open a different tab/window for the internet, go to Youtube (or another video hosting website – I’m sure there are much better ones out there) and find the video you want to embed (perhaps it’s Winter Winds, if we’re going down the Mumford & Sons route). Beneath the video, you will see a button that says ‘Share’ and then ‘Embed’ (most likely). Click on that. A window will pop up beneath the button, automatically highlighting the HTML code you need. If you are on youtube make sure you choose the option ‘use old embed code’ or it will not work. Once you’ve done this, highlight the long HTML code (big, long line of digits and letters etc) to highlight it again. Copy this code, go back to your blog, and paste the code underneath your text (right click on mouse, or Ctrl+V). Make sure that you have created space for the video by pressing the ‘Enter’ key once or twice. Now you will see the code, but no video. Do not panic! Go back to the tabs above the tool bar and select ‘Visual’ again. An orangey box will appear where your video is. You can check whether is has worked by clicking on the ‘Preview’ button in the ‘Publish’ box on the right hand side of your screen.
If you’re happy, make sure you’ve tagged the blog as you want it tagged, and then go ahead and publish it!
Here’s one we made earlier:
NB: some Youtube videos are protected by privacy settings that will not allow you to copy and paste their HTML code. Sorry, but you’re on your own here. Try and find a bootleg version maybe?
Songs:
Generally you should be able to embed the youtube video of the song you want, but if this is only available on Sound Cloud, for example, you can do exactly the same as you did to embed the video, find the embed code on sound cloud and pop into the HTML side of the blog! Like this:
Child of Fury by Tati Kalveks AbubillaMusic
Yay now you’re a pro, happy blogging!