Descent Into Madness

So far, the only one who's been bold enough to send his work to us at

gallery@vote-sanchez.com

has been Rorschach Redemption. Working on the age-old principle that hard work and initiative should never go unpunished, we're going to post his work to show his steady descent from naughty schoolboy to psychotic gunman.

Small-Print Tutorial - Blink Damn It!

Today's tutorial was going to be a worked example of making a clip-art ink-blot submission to Rorschach Redemption's blog, but, while posting the animated .GIFs above, we found that the damned things just wouldn't animate. When we posted .GIFs a couple of weeks ago (Bart and MARiZA) we could just upload the images in the Blogger "New Post" window and they animated from the get-go.

Comparing RR's creations to the pictures of Bart & MARiZA, we suspect that the key difference is the pixel size of the image (not the size of the image file). Bart is 200x150, MARiZA is 256x204 while RR's pictures are 378x596.

So, how do you post a "large" animated .GIF on blogspot? You need to upload the file onto another image storage service. I use docs.google.com. a) it's free and b) you're already signed up if you're logged into blogspot.

You can access Google Docs either directly at docs.google.com or via the link at "My Account" on your blogspot dashboard.

Click the upload button and follow prompts to upload the .GIF. Tick the check-box for the image file in the main Docs window and use <Share><Share Settings><Change> to make sure that the image file is a "Public" document that can be accessed by anyone.

Click the image file once to bring up a docs window. You'll note that the image isn't animated. Right click on the image and <Copy link address> and you now have a link to the animated version of the image in the clipboard.

Back in the blogspot "New post" window, you can switch from "Compose" mode to "Edit HTML" and replace the src="<URL of the image at blogspot>" with src="URL of the image at Google docs".

Phew! I've underlined the steps that you will forget.

Or you can just say "screw it" and shrink the image (<Image><Scale Image>)

After this slight diversion, we'll post the Ink Blot Tutorial tomorrow: I need a drink now.