The Birth of Gogoray
Posted November 5th, 2007 by Administrator
It has been 9 months and 3 days since I relaunched gogoray.net as a Drupal 5 work-in-process, and today I’m proud to announce some new features I have added so that we may have a more content-rich community site. Please read the rest of this blog and keep up with the latest happenings in the “What’s going on” forum.
First off, the new Image content type allows Contributors to share images by displaying them in the communal Image Gallery and categorizing them with Tags made on-the-fly.
Secondly, the Video content type allows Contributors to share embedded videos from sites like YouTube in the Video Channel, categorized with Tags.
Our third new feature is the Share link at the bottom of each entry; this allows anyone to send a bookmark for the entry to any of the supported social web sites like Delicious, Facebook, or Digg, spreading the gooey goodness of gogoray beyond the confines of our hopelessly inbred userbase.
The fourth and final new thing is an easier way to attach images to story and column entries that will automagically resize as thumbnails when in teasers, and display inline resized versions when viewing the full entry. Before, Contributors had to manually attach an image, then use some HTML and CSS to insert and style it to float inline with their entry, but now they can just upload the image and all the coding will happen by itself. It even lets you set a title and alternative text for the image. All I ask of you is to make your image filenames match the format of File-Name.jpg before you upload so that everything will look nice, and it will be easier to figure out the content of an image. The other thing you should do is use the alternative text field to describe the content of the image for the sight-impaired, and use the title text field to name and give credit for the photo, as this will displayed on mouse-overs of the image. This holds true for any image content type. I took the liberty of changing around all previous stories and columns to use this new feature, as it looks more consistent and loads faster. Please forgive me if I have stepped on anyone’s toes.
I would like to take this opportunity to remind all users to set their local timezone in their account settings since this site doesn’t automatically adjust for daylight savings. Also, you might want to have notifications sent to you whenever someone posts new entries or comments; this feature can also be enabled in your account settings. Thank you all for making gogoray.net such an interesting place to lurk!
I guess GoGoRay's real birthday is 8/1/2005
So we will have to have a GoGoRay party next time that date rolls around. Cheers!
– The Management
For Contributors: Adding an Image to the Gallery
These directions also mostly apply for adding images to Stories and Column entries.
1) Save the photo you want to add in good spot on your hard drive with a nice File-Name.jpg format. Usually right-clicking or control-clicking on a picture in your web browser will result in a dialog that lets you save it as a file. Try to use pretty descriptive names for your photos and take off cruft, as it makes it easier to identify the content later, and search engines can index photos by textual cues you give them. Therefore, ccbear23.JPG would become Cute-Cuddly-Bear.jpg using my handy-dandy system. And that is the end of my file-naming lecture.
2) In the Navigation block under your user name there’s a “Create content” link which opens up several content types, one of which is Image if you’re a Contributor. Click the “Image” link.
3) Pick a Title, and fill in Tags that describe your image. Then, click the “Choose File” button in the image fieldset to pick the file you named so nicely earlier. Click the “Upload” button.
4) After the file is uploaded, you get a little preview and a couple of fields for alternate text and title. Fill those in appropriately. In the Description box, I like to give a location, date, and credit. Or you could use it for a caption. If you’re submitting a Story or Column entry, this sort of information about the image would go in the title field for the image, where it can be seen on mouse-over.
5) Press the “Preview” or “Submit” buttons.
6) Profit?
– The Management
Computer illiterate
I’m an idiot - what’s the step-by-step instructions on adding a photo from, say, a website? Or just adding a photo in general?