KayakMind Blogging Basics

Paddlers always have good stories to tell, cool pictures and sweet video. The photo and video galleries that come with KayakMind profiles are a great way for sharing the visual aspects of paddling, but blog posts are also a great way to share stories about trips, new gear, old gear, your dog...whatever.

With that in mind I thought I'd put together a quick and dirty guide to creating blog posts. To start, you need log in and click on the My Page link on the main menu. Once your profile page opens, click on the My Blog link above your profile picture.

You can either upload a new photo by "browsing" to it on your computer or add one that's already online by pasting it's URL into the second blank field (which has "http://" in it).

The photo uploader offers some options, such as letting you choose the size at which the photo will be displayed and if it will pop up to a larger size when someone clicks on it.

You can also choose to have the text run beside smaller photos, but this function tends to cramp the pictures and requires a bit of code tweaking to put space around the photos.

The text part is fairly simple. Just type away or paste in pre-prepared text. One suggestion is to seperate sentences into more paragraphs than you normally would (maybe only 2 to 3 sentences per paragraph.) This makes it easier for people to read on their computers. (Look at most newspapers' websites and you'll notice they use very small paragraphs.)

To add a link to somewhere else on KayakMind or an external site, highlight he text you'd like to link from and click on the chain link in the menu (see below). Then type or paste the URL into the field that pops up.

You can insert photos and videos (using embed code) between groups of text or put them all at the end of the text - it's really a matter of personal preference.

I like to leave a blank line between blocks of text and photos by hitting the enter key. Embrace the Zen nature of white space.

Once you're comfortable with the basics, you can play with the blog editor's other functions, including buttons to change the look of the text and a way to add other types of files - PDFs, for instance - to a blog post.

If you have any troubles or questions, feel free to message me. I promise to offer help or, at the very least, pity. Blogs away!