Photos on Freewebs

As if there weren’t enough places on the web to keep your photos, you can also keep some on Freewebs? The interface is fairly easy to use. First thing you need to do is log in. Once you are logged in go to the Site Manager. Or you can even go there from the Site Builder. If we were to continue from the Calendar tutorial it would looks something like this.

Select Photos from the drop down located at the top left hand corner of the screen.

You can either select an Album to edit or select Add album, which is exactly what we are going to do.

Enter a New Album in the space provided or if you decide you really wanted to put it in an Existing Album then select that option and choose the album from the list.

Then Upload your photos. You can do this from you local computer by selecting Upload Photos.

You’ll get a familiar file dialog. Choose the file you want to upload from your local computer and select Open.

You can also put photos you have already uploaded into your album by selecting My Images. This tab will list all the images you have already uploaded to Freewebs.

Choose the images you want to add. Choosen images will be highlighted. Once you have the correct images for the album click Submit.

Congratulations, you have an album with some photos in it on Freewebs.

You can edit the album from this screen. Choosing which Photo to use for the album cover. Adding titles and description for the Photos and the album. You can even do some minor photo manipulations, like rotate, from this screen. Don’t forget to select Save when you are done.

Select this link to see this album on Freewebs.

Calendars on Freewebs

Were you wondering how to use the calendars on Freewebs? It’s very easy. First thing you need to do is log in. Once you are logged in go to the Site Manager. Or you can even go there from the Site Builder. If we were to continue from the Blogging tutorial it would look something like this.

Select Calendar from the drop down located at the top left hand corner of the screen.

And you will be presented with the Calendar screen. Select Add Event to add an event to the calendar.

Enter a Title for the event an any rich text Description you desire for the details. Set a Start Time and an End Time. You can also select All Day Event if the event is going to be a long one. Once you have the Add a Calendar event form filled out, then select Submit.

And your event will be recorded for posterity.

Next up: Photos

Blogging on Freewebs

Or I should call it webs now.

www.freewebs.com was a site I used to use for file storage. I never actually cared that you could actually create a website there and didn’t use that functionality. This year I started using it and they have also been improving it. Now you can get a pretty full featured website up pretty quickly.

I figured I’d put up some tutorials at using some of the features. One because I’m always looking for something to blog about lately and two because I think these tutorials will help someone out.

The first tutorial is blogging and the first step is to log into freewebs by typing your username and password in the boxes provided.

You will be presented with the dashboard for your account.

Move your mouse over Edit My Site and a drop down menu will appear. Select Site Manager from the drop down menu.

Since we are blogging select Blog from the list of pages.

And you will be presented with the Site Builder for you Blog. Select Post New Entry.

Enter a Title and use the rich text box to enter the body for your blog entry. You have a lot of formatting control over the rich text box and you can add images or embed video.

Select the Publish button when you are finished.

And you’ll have your first blog entry on Freewebs. Here is a link to the actual blog entry. Next up: Calendars

WARNING: Webs.com has been freezing sites for very little reason and often don’t respond to inquires about the freeze.  Just letting you know.

Blogging

I've only been blogging for a short period of time so I have a limited perspective on it. But I thought I would share with you what I have learned so far about weblogs.

First you've got to decide where you are going to blog. To me, this was the most critical decision. There are plenty of places to blog out there: Blogger, Word Press, Windows Live, and Freewebs - to name a few. There is even an adult one called Thumblogger.

Plus there are a couple of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Plurk, or Jaiku. They're fine if you are wanting to communicate and you don't have lots to say, but we are talking about longer blogs here.

In doing a page oriented blog, it is important that you have some log writing software. Many people use Word Press - I think this is mostly the Mac contingent. I use Windows Live Writer. It came with Windows Live, it was free and it seems full featured. Again, like your blogging host, there are a number of different programs to choose from and most of them are free.

If you don't have Blog software, you can use the online page that most blog hosts have for your blog. This is usually clunky to use and allows a serious error to occur. One time while using one of these pages, I wrote my whole entry and wanted to search for some additional information. I navigated away from the page and lost everything I had written.

Blog software, like Live Writer, makes publishing your blog easy. Besides doing WSYWYG markup, they allow you to upload the content and some even allow you to upload pictures. And not just to host sites associated with the software - anywhere.

Well almost anywhere, your host site needs to support one of the many protocols available to your blogging software. Freewebs didn't, that is why I stopped blogging there. That and it seemed to have a problem with some external images.

I was going to use Windows Live as my blogging site. But you only seem to get one blog per Windows Live account. So after looking around a bit, I choose blogger. Mostly because they were there, they specialise in blogs and I liked the look of their templates. I don't want to be spending a huge amount of time customising the site, I just want to write words.

A lot of people chose Word Press. Again, I think this is because they are Mac users but there probably are other reasons.

The last thing you need with a blog is decide on you content. I'm a pretty eclectic person so I wanted to write about everything. But I'm learning quickly that you can't do that. People have to take an interest in the subject matter of your blog in order for it to get read. This is what we are trying to achieve, isn't it? To have our blog read.

So pick a subject and stick to it - or do like I did and start a number of blogs, one for each subject you like to blog about. Before you know it you'll have more posts than you expect.