Become an Author

Want to contribute to the Sterling Adventures blog?
Simple, register and blog!

Registration
Use the Feedback link to request a user account. You’ll be sent login details by e-mail.

Avatars
An avatar is an icon used to represent a person in cyberspace… To create an avatar for use across all WordPress blogs use the Gravatar service (to create a Globally Recognised Avatar), or send the image you want to use to the Sterling Adventures webmaster to have a local avatar created for you.

Posting Instructions
It might seem daunting at first, but you’ll soon find it easy. Here are a steps to posting:

  1. Login,
  2. Write your post,
  3. Set the categories and optionally add tags to your post,
  4. Upload media (pictures, video, etc.),
  5. Insert media into your post,
  6. Set up the excerpt,
  7. Optional stuff… (Date, Country, etc.) and
  8. Publish.

1. Login
Login entering your username and password (both are case sensitive).
If you are already logged in, you will see a Site Admin link in place of Login.
You’ll now enter the administration area. This has a different look from the main site; a standard WordPress look, but you’ll soon get used to it.
From here you can write your post. You can also edit a post you have previously written (in the Manage tab).

You can get back to the site at any point by clicking View site at the top of any administration page.

2. Write Your Post
Simple; select the Write tab and start by entering the title and text of your post.

Have a play with the quick-tag buttons to enrich your post. You can create numbered lists (ol), bullets (ul), make text bold or italicised, create links etc. Just play about, then select Save before previewing the page with View this Page.

3. Categories
Check the categories that apply to your post and, optionally, set any tags you want.

4. Upload Media (Pictures, Video, etc.)
A crucial step if you want to illustrate your posting. Click the Add media icons for the media type you want to upload. Click the Choose files to upload button in the new window that opens to find the files you want to upload from your computer.

When the media has uploaded you may enter a title, caption and description - although these are not required.

Hints:

  • Try to upload scaled images (i.e. not the full 2MB+ files straight from your camera) if you can, it’ll be much quicker. But don’t worry if you can’t, scaled and thumbnail versions that are the right size for the blog’s pages are automatically created for you.
  • Videos should always be compressed before uploading. Aim for 1MB to allow people to view your videos easily with common broadband speeds.
  • You may upload more than one file at a time.

Now you can select the media to add to your post, from either the Gallery or Media Library tabs…

5. Insert Media into Your Post
Select the media you want to insert from the tabs - Gallery (media associated with this post) or Media Library (all available media). Once selected, you’ll see some choices of how the media can be used.

Make the these choices for thumbnail images (used in the Excerpt):

  1. Click None under Link URL.
  2. Choose None for the Alignment.
  3. Choose Thumbnail for the Size.
  4. Use the Insert into Post button to insert the media into the text.
  5. You’ll need to cut & paste the markup from the post text to the Excerpt.

Make these choices for pictures (used in the main post text):

  1. Click None under Link URL.
  2. Choose your Alignment, probably Center.
  3. Choose Medium for the Size.
  4. Use the Insert into Post button to insert the media into the post text.

Make these choices for videos:

  1. You need not make any choices for videos, just use the Insert into Post button to insert the media into the text. But there is some markup to add…

  2. <script type="text/javascript">Write_Movie("THE_MOVIE", WIDTH, HEIGHT, true);</script>

    Replace THE_MOVIE with something like:

    http://www.sterling-adventures.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/yyyy/mm/THE_MOVIE.mp4

    You should be able to cut & paste this from the markup inserted in step 1.

  3. Be careful to preserve the aspect ratio when setting the WIDTH and HEIGHT.

Hints:

  • The width of an image is 600 pixels. Or, with the code for full page width pictures (see next point), is 700 pixels.
  • To have an image across the full page width (make sure the image is the right size though; width is 700 pixels), simply copy & paste this code into the post text:

    <div style="margin-left: -40px;"><img src='THE_IMAGE' ... /></div>

    You have to select a picture to replace THE_IMAGE. Easiest, just wrap the <img ... > from the Insert into Post step above and delete any other code.

  • Movies can be massive files! Therefore it is essential to scale them before uploading, a size of 480 x 320 pixels is good with mono sound and MP4 compression. Aim for much less than 2MB. A few 100k is achievable with the correct MP4 settings…

6. Set the Excerpt Text
This is the text you see on the index page. It is optional in that if you don’t enter anything the first words of the post text from the post will be automatically used.

However, to include thumbnail on the index page follow the choices for thumbnails above and then copy & paste from the post text to the excerpt.

By including a thumbnail, you also have to select the excerpt text yourself. Use copy & paste from the main editor or write your own teaser…

Note that to include this thumbnail in any RSS Feeds, you must include the full URL for the image (i.e. http://www.sterling-adventures.co.uk/…). You get this anyway if you use the technique described above.

7. Optional Stuff
Here are a few other things you may want to do, all are optional…

  • Set the date of your post (suggest to the date of your adventure) by clicking on Edit under Publish Status on the right. This defaults to Publish immediately, so if you are quick about posting your adventures you’ll be able to accept the default (a few less clicks).
  • Set a country for your adventure. Under the Custom Fields section select Country and enter the country as the value. For example, Australia.
  • Password protect a posting. Obviously only those people who know the password can then read it on the WWW.
  • Limit discussions. By default these (comments and pings) are allowed (checked). Leave them that way if you want others to be able to reply to your posting and reference it from other blogs respectively.

8. Publish to the WWW!
Go on, just click that Publish button!
You can also Save your work and come back later to complete it.