Wednesday, December 22, 2010

HASA How-tos - December 2010

This month's HASA How-to tells you how to display an image, for instance an award banner, with your story.

How do I...
... display an image with my story?


You can put images into story chapters or in your story intro by linking to them. Images in the story intro will not display on the story lists, only in the story's own overview page, so if you want to display an award that your story has won, put information about your award in the intro as well to have it show up in the story lists. For example, say "Winner of Legolas in Funny Hats Award, 2009". Search engines will find this text.


Where to link your image from
Images cannot be hosted on HASA, so you need to place them somewhere else, for instance Picasa, Photobucket, LJ, your own webspace...

Before uploading your image to the web, remember to reduce the file size and pixel dimensions of larger images by using your photo editing software's 'save for web' option. This won't usually be necessary for award banners. Smaller images load faster and display more clearly than images sized with HTML.

Get the URL of the image before linking your image. Check that you linked to the image and not the page it is on by pasting the URL into your browser's address bar. If you see the picture rather than the whole page after hitting Enter, you have the right URL.


How to link to your image
When you're editing a chapter, there is an 'add image' button on the toolbar:



This gives you a dialogue where you can specify where the image you're linking to is hosted, and you can also provide a short description of the image (this is what shows up when the image itself doesn't load for whatever reason; it's also what is used by screen readers, so it's useful to fill in, even if it says no more than 'image of ....'), and a few other settings, which you can ignore if you like. Now press 'insert' and your image should be there.


Have fun!

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