Here's the conversation I've just had with a member of staff at one of our schools. Nobody's shown her how to do it she's just dived in. I caught a message from the notify list and thought, 'why's she doing that?' As I do. I mailed her back with some instructions...

Hi Kierna,
You're a newbie. We all were once :-) You've added a lot of text to this thumbnail. Usually, you'd only add a line. This line then becomes a caption under the thumbnail.

You'd have done better, uploading the thumb, as you did, then adding a small bit of text to the large description box. Then, copying one of the "shortcuts" into a... Well anywhere really, usually a news item for the front page, or into a story.

Don't forget you can call me any time till 10pm and I can talk you through some of this stuff.
Steve

Hi Steve,
Thanks Steve, was really just practising!! Hope to get hang of it eventually,
Kierna

Hi Kierna,
Heh ;-) That's good to hear. Sure you'll get the hang of it. Easiest thing to do is just send stuff via email, you can always go in and tidy it once it arrives. I'm always picking at my posts :-)))
Steve

Hi Steve,
Do you mean I can just email you with pictures etc. & you'll up load them for me? Is there a catch or are you just very kind!!!
Kierna

Hi Kierna,
Kind? Phoee! Clever! I don't do it, I've programmed your website to do it. You send an email to your secret address. The website does the rest. Everything.

Now... At first just send an email, with a picture. Nothing fancy, just that.
http://www.walsallschools.org/email#atItsSimplest

Just make sure you send address is from your regular school address. Any old email address—we don't know about. Tell us any that you'd like to use.

And that you attach jpegs. Just told Rob off for sending BMPs.

Then, you can look at the weird and wonderful things you can do as extra. It's very powerful. And quick. Takes 5-7 minutes to get onto your front page.
Steve

It worked!!! Thanks
Kierna

Hi Kierna,
As you can see, it worked but needs some re-touching. If you'd have given your email a subject line, it would have become the title of the post. If you'd have modified the JPEG's file name, that would have been the caption. Body text becomes body text.

When you get cleverer, you can email yourself a list of departments. Just send to your secret email addy, with the word departments as the subject line. Then, you'll be able to email directly into departments. All the customisations [[[switches]]] are so that you/me/we/others don't have to come back and re-edit and clean up and beautify.

But they don't matter now. I bet the realisation that it's a snap to whack 30 pictures into your website is going to take a while to sink in. I'll expect plenty of updates from you. In time. :-)
Steve



After I screen shotted and sent the email. I had to come back and colour the text. (We only accept plain old text emails. Though you can write HTML in there, long hand.) But still, getting the bulk of the message and pictures into your site, quickly; then going back from the link in the email to tidy and re-read is a dream way of working.
# Posted by steve hooker at 22/1/09; 9:05:08 PM to the How tos dept.
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Email to website