So you wanna join the big leagues? You wanna post an image? Great! Too bad you're a n00b who doesn't know the difference between HTML and THRTJRJKLQ.
But never fear, I'll save you.
By the way, this might be extremely rudimentary for some of you, even if you don't know exactly how to post an image. But I'm going to go over everything (or at least a lot of things) in a very simplified manner for the benefit of those who aren't in the know. And if there are a lot of questions, I'll add EVEN MORE to this little tutorial to clear things up and make posting pics on Rob's easier.
First thing's first. Hear ye! Hear ye, bitches! Taking a picture that's on your hard drive, dragging it to your browser, and pasting it in the posting window for us to see DOES NOT WORK. All that does is tell your browser to display the image file that's still on your hard drive so that YOU can see it. If you want the rest of us to see it, you have to actually put the image on the internet first. Makes sense, right? Sending the image from your computer to the internet is called
uploading the image, by the way. You have to upload the image first, then can you use it in a post.
So now that you've put the image on the net-- What? Oh, you don't know WHERE on the internet to put it? That's fine. It's a big internet out there, after all. Good news is there are approximately 1,342,543,563,424,003 places on the internet capable of holding that picture for you. Theoretically, in fact, you could put it just about anywhere on the web and display your picture. Bad news is theory doesn't mean shite. You'll only be able to use about twelve of those places for free without getting in trouble for "stealing bandwidth." Well, it isn't really all that bad. Just follow one of the links below.
Photobucket
ImageShack
Image Hosting
"Upload 2"
All of those places allow you to take pictures from your hard drive and place them on their website for free. In tech speak, they will "host" your images. Each of those sites have their limits, of course, and you'll have to find out for yourself what those limits are, but if you're lucky a bunch of RKMBers will come to this thread after I'm done and tell you where they go to get their pictures hosted.
Photobucket is on top for a reason. It's my favorite. If you go there and don't know what to do,
click here. That's their tutorials page. You'll find lots of help there. You can learn
how to set up a Photobucket account for yourself,
how to upload an image to their site,
how to upload several images at one time,
and other stuff. It's waaaaay too much for me to post here tonight, but if people get confused, I'll edit this at some point and try to sum up what those pages say. That will be then and this is now, though, so you're just have to go there and see.
Another thing you should know: a lot of stuff on that main tutorial page (the "click here" link above) is there for putting videos on their site, so you won't need to worry about most of that page for now. As of the time of this writing, only the first four links on that page are worth your time.
All right, so that took a little time but it was worth it. You finally got that picture you just HAD to share on the net...somewhere. Now what?
URL. Uniform Resource Locator. Whu? Basically, an URL is just an address on the World Wide Web. Just like a mailing address on a postcard, an URL tells your browser where to go to find something, whether it be a page, a song, a picture, or anything else.
On a postcard it's a bunch of numbers, a street name, stuff, city, state, yadda, yadda. Look at the top of your browser. You see that line that begins with "http:"? You guessed it. That's an url.
http://www.myspace.com/jasoneperkins
That's the url of my myspace page. Put it in your favorite places. It'll be worth something after Ragtag Heroes gets published :-D
http://myspace-594.vo.llnwd.net/01234/49/50/1234860594_m.jpg
That's a picture of me. You see how it ends in ".jpg"? That's the same way it would be on your computer. It could have ended in ".gif", or ".bmp" or about a dozen other ways and you still would have been able to see it, but the ".jpg" ending is probably the most popular nowadays for a few reasons I won't get into here. Just know that URLs for images usually start with "http:" and end with one of those three-letter endings I listed (and a few others).
Oh, and if they contain an equal sign, you can't use it. Long story. Just know that you can't.
The fact that the url ends in one of those ways, though, lets your browser know that the url is for an image and that the thing it's pointing to has to be displayed as a picture. Same way your computer program knows to display the image for you to see on your hard drive.
Anywho, after you upload your picture to whatever image hosting site you choose, you'll probably get a screen showing you your new picture URL. Like I said: "http:......" COPY THAT!
Come back to Rob's. Are you here? Good. Open up a new post window. Look near the bottom. You see that link that says "Image"? It's in the box labelled "Instant UBB Code". Click it. You'll get this:
Code:
[image][/image]
Good stuff. You're almost done. All you have to do is paste the URL you copied in between those tags. That's right, between the first "]" and the "[".
By the way, there are other ways to post an image here. You COULD just type the those image tags in yourself, with the image URL in between. That'll work too, but you have to be sure that you type out those tags exactly as I've typed 'em.
Now, I suggest you keep that box that says "I want to preview my post" checked. If there isn't a check mark there, check it. You're new, so this might take a few attempts to work and it's good to see what you'll get BEFORE you post it wrong and look like a dumas. If it doesn't look right and you can't figure out why, post whatever you've got in this thread and ask. Someone will help you...maybe.
Post it and you're done. Remember, though, that some people don't want you using their pictures elsewhere, so if you go somewhere else and take a picture URL and try using it here, it might not work for other people to see, even if YOU can see it. Weird, I know, but it's called image blocking and a lot of sites do it, so watch out.
I'll try to remember to write up something on posting OTHER PEOPLE'S images later. I probably won't remember to do that at all, though.
You should be good to go now. You can do it! I believe in you and so do they.
