Adding your blog post

Adding your blog post to the Social Reporting site is easy and quick. Your post will appear in the Social Reporting site and in the Transition Network blogs listings. You will be able to forward your post to others, and people will be able to 'like' it to Facebook, 'tweet' it on Twitter, and bookmark it on Delicious. Follow the steps below to add your post: 

NB: to add a Social Reporter blog post, you need to be:

1. A 'social reporter'
2. Logged in

1. Login from the homepage top grey bar - top right:

2. Land on your account page and click 'create content' (right hand block)

3. In 'create content', select 'Social Reporting blog post'

4. Add Title, the 'Transition stage', 'Transition theme' and 'tags' (keywords) 

• 'Themes' are the Transition theme that this post might relate to: energy, transport, inner transition etc. You can chose as many as you want
• 'Tags' are keywords you chose to describe the item (and appear in a cool looking 'tag cloud' elsewhere). It might be gardening, or carpentry, or ethno-botany or whathave you. Charlotte will be adding 'tags' to the system so these should show up when you add them.

5. Add the body text (and a video link to youtube or vimeo if you've got one)

NB: please write your item in a word processing package on your computer and save it there first. Then copy the text from your word processing package and paste it into the WYSIWYG editor as below. Word processing packages have lots of layout code and stuff we never see, which the machine needs to strip out so that the website style can make your text look good.

Please use the 'Paste as plain text' option, then format the text in the editor. If you really have to, use the 'Paste from word' option. You can see them on the editor toolbar, or on the left here...

6. To add an image, click on the 'insert/edit image icon' in the body text editor

NB: always add the image after a few lines of text. We use the first few lines of text as a 'teaser' in the various locations the blog post appears

The image adding process is easy to understand once you understand it as a two stage process. You have to:

1. find and upload the image from your computer to the website's file management system
2. edit the image once you are embedding it into your post

7. The image properties box pops up. Click on 'browse server'

8. The website's file browser will pop up - click on 'upload' (top left) to get something off your computer

9. Select the image from your computer

10. The image will go into the website's file browser. Click on 'Insert File' (right on top bar)

11. The image properties box will appear again. Add Alternative text (very brief description), check the size and alignment. Click OK.

12. The image will now be embedded into your blog post (hurray!). You can keep typing and stuff.

13. Click save, hey presto - here's your blog post:

About the author

Ed is the Web Manager for Transition Network. This means that he works on all the web stuff from the day to day support, to tactical activities to strategic and special projects work for Transition Network about linking up all the Transition Initiative websites without them having to come to the main site all the time for updates and news.

He lives in Bristol, likes digging and climbing, growing vegetables and reading, bicycles and books, swimming, camping and generally being outdoors.