Posting tips
We have deliberately set-up this blog to be as user-friendly as possible which means that some of the so-called 'security' features are disabled to encourage greater participation.
Comments
For the moment, anybody can submit comments without pre-registration and these will posted immediately.
However, any inappropriate comments will be deleted.
If you don't have a Typepad account, just type in your name with your comment and then click preview or post, as required.
If you do have a Typepad account, you can log-in to display your standard 'signature' link on the comment.
Original Articles
In order for you to post original articles, we need to set you up as an author which is a fairly simple process—if you don't have a (FREE) Typepad account, you can set one up as part of that process.
Just send us an email to articles@francoflyers.org and we will initiate the process.
To submit a post, you first log into www.typepad.com which shows a list of blogs for which you have posting privileges.
Click on the relevant blog title and then on the 'compose' tab and start typing—the keyboard response may be slightly sluggish at times because your document resides on the Typepad server rather than your own hard disk.
To amend an existing post, click on the 'list posts' link and click on the relevant post.
For convenience, the blog is organised into categories which may be selected from a drop-down list on the right-hand side of the compose screen.
It is probably easiest to use the simple word-processing facility provided by Typepad, which has basic controls such as bold, italic, bullet points, numbered-lists and a spell-checker.
Note that the spell-checker uses an 'American' version of English.
Font size, typeface and colour are set for the site though you can change these using the same sort of controls as you would find in any word processing software.
If you want to make more-complex format changes than allowed by these controls, you can go into the HTML view and change the code directly—unless you really know what you are doing, DON'T.
Pasting from other Applications
If you want to write the article using other software such as Microsoft Word, best to save it as plain text before pasting into Typepad or the background code may conflict with the standard settings of the blog, leaving you with lots of niggly formatting problems.
Be sure to close and re-open a document saved in plain text before using copy/paste to transfer information to your blog.
Note that users of Microsoft Office 2007 onwards may create blog postings on their own PC and then upload them directly—that process is beyond the scope of this article.
Pictures
To insert a picture, either start a new paragraph, or place the cursor at the beginning of an existing paragraph, and click the 'insert image' link.
By default, a 'thumbnail' picture of 270 pixels wide will be displayed in the posting and the main photo will be displayed by clicking on the thumbnail.
These settings can be changed by selecting 'use custom settings' when uploading the picture.
The image may be displayed with text-wrapping to the right of left—to display an image on a paragraph without text, a 'thumbnail' size of 500 pixels wide with no text-wrapping will fill the available space.
It is no longer necessary to resize a picture before posting as Typepad automatically limits the maximum size that you get in the 'pop-up' version of the picture.
With small pictures of less than 270 pixels, do disable the 'thumbnail' setting or you will get a picture of about the same size but inferior quality.
Only the Site Administrator can post pictures to the Flying Photos album.
Posting
By default, the posting status (top right in the compose screen) is set to 'draft' which allows you to save your work without putting it on-line.
When you are ready to post, just select 'post now'in the posting status and each subsequent save of that article will post changes directly on-line.
You can also use the 'preview' button to see the results before posting—the preview has been much improved since this article was first written but it's still a good idea to view the final result by saving in 'post now' mode and then viewing with the 'view post' link at the the top of the compose screen.
Help and Support
Actually, the on-line 'help' documentation from Typepad is about the best I have seen and their email support people also respond very quickly with accurate answers.
You should find everything you need there but do feel free to email me with any technical issues.
