May 10, 2016 at 12:12 pm

My dear @dawnwriter, all those mentions of chicken dishes have my mouth watering. And I have only just recently eaten!

I love hearing about all the wonderful dishes my friends in Asia prepare, but I often find I am not sure what the food is like. I think many of us in the West would love to read posts that explain the different foods. This is a good way to write about things you know well, but in a way that will attract many page views from Westerners – which is what Google prefers 🙂

May 10, 2016 at 11:53 am

@sunil I believe that is the size of image I included with my last submission, so we will see how it fares when the post publishes.

Unfortunately, when we create images for social media sharing, each site has different optimal sizes. The 640×480 px image that works as a featured image on many sites is too wide and not tall enough for Pinterest, which relies very heavily on images for sharing.

On other sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the image should be wider than it is long (horizontal or landscape orientation.) But again, each site has different sizing guidelines and aspect ratios. The best way to ensure that our images display well when our readers share our posts to those sites is to add the right sized images to our posts, so the site will find what it’s looking for when it crawls the post during sharing.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t set the image to display in a smaller format here in order to improve loading time or the overall look of our posts. But that’s where the support staff come in.

We need clear guidelines from @admin or @support as to what size images work best for featured image and in the body of the post. And we need to be able to upload graphics optimized for social media sharing, even though we may reduce display size when we add them to the post.

As of my last post submission earlier today, the “Add Media” was opening into a real mess that I couldn’t even view properly. Just checking on it now as I write this reply, it seems very much improved. I suspect staff are working behind the scenes 🙂

Looking forward to more news!

May 10, 2016 at 4:43 am

@kaka135 Yes, it’s true that Pinterest doesn’t like the short links. They do generally work on both Twitter and Google+, however. And on Facebook they seem pretty reliable – although sometimes the image that gets shared won’t be the one you expected to see!

For Pinterest, if you click the “See it now” button when the pin is first created, you can open it. From there, just click “Edit” to access the URL that is pinned. It’s very simple to add the referral code to the end of the existing link 🙂

May 10, 2016 at 3:03 am

Awesome news, @support! Thanks for taking the time to discuss this as a team, and for getting back to us so fast once the decision was made.

I think this will benefit a lot of people who had content on sites that are closed or no longer paying. I know Persona Paper is one site that has stayed open especially to allow members to retrieve their posts in case they want to re-publish elsewhere.

And last week BlogJob’s owner said too that he would understand if people wanted to remove content and take it to sites that are paying. I know many of us intend to keep our ties with BlogJob, but have realized that maybe we had started too many blogs on the site. So a number of us will be wanting to remove, de-index, and repurpose content that still has good SEO value.

May 10, 2016 at 1:29 am

@sunil It’s very simple to crop or resize an image, given the correct dimension for the site. That is why I was asking for admin to help. We need to know what the best size is for featured image, and also for images inserted into posts.

May 10, 2016 at 1:27 am

@kaka135 I haven’t heard about Pablo until now. I’ll have to add it to my list of graphics editors to try!

@morgoodie Just a heads up: GIMP can be a little intimidating at first! I knew how to use PSP quite well, but was really lost with GIMP at first. If you’re stuck on anything, there are some great YouTube tutorials and all the user’s manual how-to stuff is online. So just Google whatever it is you’re trying to do, and you’ll find lots of good info 🙂

As for buying the Pixabay artists a coffee, I’ve yet to try. But I think you just put in whatever amount you want to give.

@icybc I haven’t tried any of the three apps you mention, but PicMonkey is on my list for next one to test out. Do you use different apps for specific tasks, or just open whatever you feel like using at the time?

May 10, 2016 at 12:41 am

@kaka135 Yes, I remember that mention of unlocking more functions. It would be great to be able to edit posts, as well as to submit posts and save/edit drafts through the WordPress dashboard 🙂

May 9, 2016 at 10:42 pm

@kaka135 I agree with you: the forum score feels more like a reputation thing than a matters of earnings. I believe the goal is to establish some people as regular contributors, mentors, or even experts in a given area. Obviously, once somebody achieves such a rank other readers will give more weight to their forum posts and replies.

This tends to help the site, because it allows those users who have more perceived clout to field the newbie questions and guide other users in anything that’s already well established on the site. When users can take care of that, it means the admin have more time to handle the complex questions.

May 9, 2016 at 10:24 pm

@morgoodie Don’t worry Sherry, you don’t have to do all of this! You can get results from simply sharing your link as is. All the extra steps are pretty overwhelming if you try to learn them all at once. It’s fine to just take it one step at a time, and worry about the rest when you feel you understand it better 🙂

I’ll try to make up a tutorial for how to use the link shortening soon, though, as it is useful when links are really long. It’s also nice to see how many people are clicking on your links!

May 9, 2016 at 10:07 pm

@swalia Yes, it is a good idea to do a little bit of editing when migrating content. Sometimes this is necessary because the original post makes reference to something that was time sensitive, or because there are links or tags that go to a site that is now defunct. But even if the editing isn’t absolutely necessary to a reader’s understanding of the content, it still makes sense to rework a post whenever possible.

@bestwriter You really don’t like to be told you can’t do something, do you Grace? Nobody has said at this point that we can’t republish posts from another site. Then again, the decision isn’t up to us as users. It is something the admin must rule on. Even though original content may not be an issue with Google or their spam/plagiarism software, many sites prefer not to allow repurposed content. And that is their prerogative.

Their site, their rules. He who pays the piper names the tune.

May 9, 2016 at 9:50 pm

@grecy095 and @kaka135 Thank you both for your generous compliments! As I often say, I’m only just learning all of this too! I love to share with you because it helps me to learn better when I explain something to others. It’s very rewarding to hear that others find it helpful too 🙂

May 9, 2016 at 11:19 am

@grecy095 Thanks so much for the compliment! It’s very kind of you 🙂

Goo.gl tracks how many times each of your links is clicked. When you click on “Details” next to the link you shortened, it will show you the data. You must be signed into Google in order for the service to record and store your link data.

Where did you share your link, Grecy? It will be interesting to see which types of promotion yield the best results 🙂

May 9, 2016 at 9:35 am

@peachpurple I really dislike the Paint programs, as their functionality is too basic. I have had IrfanView on my computer for my than a decade, and this is one of my “go to” apps for viewing graphics. I find it has lots of great options for image manipulation, and fairly good for adding text to images. It also comes in handy for odd things like taking a screen capture or playing Ogg Vorbis formatted files (*.ogg sound files.) IrfanView is free, very small, and very simple to install on your computer.

My other graphics app is GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s also free, but it’s more complex to use. If you are familiar with Photoshop or PaintShop Pro (PSP) you will find it fairly easy to use. I do have to look things up sometimes, though, because GIMP does some things differently from PSP.

You can certainly crop and resize images in either of these apps.

May 9, 2016 at 9:23 am

@lovem I don’t know exactly why WangGand or WP would prevent posting if the content has been removed and deindexed. The only place there might possibly be a record of the post is archiving sites like the WayBack Machine. Chances of them having archived an old Bubblews post? Meh! I’ve tried finding some of my old posts on the WTB, and they weren’t there.

If the content has been removed from the net and isn’t archived or indexed anymore, any plagiarism check isn’t going to be triggered unless your content was already very close to other published sources.

@bestwriter I agree that Google, WP and WangGard will have nothing to find if you’ve done your writing well and it hasn’t been archived where they can search it. But the admin here may still have their own preferences about whether to accept “recycled” content, or in what proportion to fresh content.

May 9, 2016 at 6:02 am

@peachpurple We are making chicken noodle soup for supper! I can’t wait! Even in the worst heat of summer, I love soup.

The cranberry barbecue chicken is made in a crockpot. I will write up a post for you 🙂