Saturday, October 27, 2007

For Ian, Because Yellbox is NOT Cooperating

As it appears, I could not, for the life of me, figure out why I couldn't write a damn thing in the damn tagboard. Could be the anti-right-click thing I got going but how come other people could? Did I just Macky-proof my own blog? Boo.

Now the question about images. Let me tell you right off the bat, that I have done some major struggling (and serious amounts of ranting) about this matter in the way of pathetic image-postings of my poor now-dead dogs. Fortunately, as those forays into the realm of digital coolness turned me over to the relatively blogger-friendly neighborhood Blogger, things have become waaaay easier.

First, what is an image? An image is nothing but a rendition of what it truly is, fetched from an abode within or without the realms of the entity that is doing the fetching. Say I post an image of me laughing insanely, is it really me or just a version of me?

So say we had that philosophical discussion all wrapped up and tied neatly, the next thing you must understand is the problem of ownership. There are prodigious copyright issues that can come after you if you directly link to an image that has been created by somebody else, unless you pick them up from somewhere like this, and if the entity carrying it subscribes to the CreativeCommons concept, then you can check whether it has granted anything to public users regarding his work. You can also try reading this and exploring this.

If you have your own pictures you can upload them to Photobucket or Flickr although Photobucket has virtually unlimited storage and this really cool mass upload thing (a hundred pictures at a time), and what I use for this blog.

So say you have this whole copyright thing down pat, then we should go about grabbing a picture's URL. The free stock pictures require you to download them first on to your computer so you must do that, then either upload the image to any of the free image hosting sites I mentioned, or browse to it when you are adding an image while writing a post.

How exactly, you ask. Well, see this picture here:
where the red circle tells you what to click. When the dialog box opens, Blogger gives you two choices:You can either add an image directly from your computer, meaning you can upload your picture to Blogger's repository, or this:

But then you say, gawd, Macky, I already know these things, my question really was how do I get the URL of the image I am interested in? Patience, pumpkin. We're getting there.

In the case of Photobucket the matter has been addressed quite smartly with the use of one of three (or four, I forget) options where it says Direct Link. All you have to do is click anywhere inside the text box area and viola, you have it up in your clipboard.

In the case of random images (granting you've checked/obtained permission/really really wanna have the image up your blog bahala na kung makulong or what), the key to getting the URL is to keep clicking until you get to that page where the image is all there is, and the address bar ends with something like .gif, .png, or .jpg. This says you've arrived at where this image really lives. Then go copy that URL.

You can also try right-clicking the image from where it is, clicking on Properties and noting the Location of the file. Works like a charm. Still, still, better play it safe by asking permission, or downloading the image and modifying it a bit (I will deny ever having said that, though), or creating one of your own na lang.

Now that you have the URL of your image, you can, as mentioned above, paste it in the URL section of the image dialog box in Blogger. However, if you want to be a hardcore coder like me (meaning to hell with the GUIs and all that clicking), then you can simply type in code like this right inside the blogger posting text area:
< img src="http://whereverthehellmyimageis">
You can also specify other shit like alternative text, borders, etc. by placing a space after the last quotation mark, and typing in alt="sumshit" or something smart-ass like that. For a crash course on HTML, click here.

Now if I just totally misunderstood your question then I guess I just hugely embarrassed myself and in that case I will charge this to experience and hope things work well in other areas of my life so help us, God.
Mood: nerdox

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

pumpkin?

Macky said...

unless you prefer some other vegetable