as I was saying on the Fitzgerald topic on the GL Forum...OK so far so good but nobody has yet answered the oft-asked question "how to post a picture on this bulletin board" I tried several times before I succeeded last week in making a my picture of a CNR diesel in Jasper Alberta stick
So I thought a short tutorial would help those members of the great unwashed public who are not as gifted as Al the Watchman!!! No insult intended or implied.
First of all you must be linking to a picture file that is already on a web page somwhere preferably your own so that it does not get removed at the site owners whim But you have no site I hear you protest??In fact your own site is not a difficult thing to set up just Google for "free web sites" and pick one that appeals to you from the over 4 million results Google currently displays.
Most free sites are suported by annoying advertising banners or pop-ups but for the purposes of this tutorial that is of no real consequence. I think all or most of them have a built-in system for uploading your files to your site. I usually go to
http://www.freeservers.com (who I chose to host my own site
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk and they feature an easy to use program called File Manager.
So create your site for example lets say you have ended up with
http://www.veryownmysite.freeservers.com
As a real example this is an earlier site I opened
http://johnfowles.freehosting.net
and you have uploaded a picture (named picture.jpg) to the root or lowest level on the site (of course you can create multiple folders to store your files and link accordingly
next you ascertain the exact URL (or web address) of the picture
in this case it will be quite simple
http://johnfowles.freehosting.net/picture.jpg
Now verify that the link will function
So copy the exact web address into your browser's address bar
now the tricky bit
the Discussion forum utilises a simplified version of the usual web page "language" (HTML) which they call UBB Code
you simply type your message then add the appropriate UBB link to your masterpiece
The format for doing this is actually detailed if you click on the link "UBB Code is on" that appears in the left hand box under "your Reply " if you are replying to a posting
It tells you in the section “Adding Images”:-
"To add a graphic within your message, just encase the URL of the graphic image and the piece includes a sample link with the UBB Code in red).
So in[ my example I will include this line in my message
imghttp://johnfowles.freehosting.net/picture.jpg/img
I have deliberately omitted the sqare tag brackets [ and ] in the line above in an attempt to clarify matters
but if I then add them the picture SHOULD appear:-
if it does Bingo if it doesn't grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
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My Gordon Lightfoot webring
starts at
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/lightfoot
[This message has been edited by johnfowles (edited August 24, 2003).]