Personal Blogs

Blogging indents

As far as blog facilities go the OU blog is about average and is easier to use than some. However one problem is trying to format text to get a neat presentation of facts by indentation or tables. Even if like me you have some knowledge of HTML many tags get stripped out when a blog is saved but there are a few relevant ones that do not. There is a neat way to indent paragraphs by any desired amount for example. Suppose we have paragraphs:

She sells sea shells

On the sea shore.

Perhaps an indent of half an inch (12.5mm) looks better for 'On the sea shore.' Simply type the lines in as above and open the HTML editor (the bleary blue HTML next to the preview icon). Find the lines

<p>She sells sea shells</p>

<p>On the sea shore.</p>

in the code and change the second line to:

<p class="western" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">On the sea shore.</p>

Or if the line was a heading in italics it would then be

<h3 class="western" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>On the sea shore.</i></h3>

Headings, italics, bold, etc. can be applied or removed in the 'WYSIWYG' editor before or after applying the indentation.

The end result:

She sells sea shells

On the sea shore.

Blogging tables

The OU blog also accepts tables and making these is even easier because no HTML editing is required - unless you need to delete a table using the supplied editor that is. The downside is that it does not allow tables with lines but this is definitely better than nothing.

To use tables fire up your OpenOffice.org Writer (MS Word might also work but has not been tested). Type in required tables or the complete blog entry and save as Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP .doc format. Select all or individual tables / sections, Copy and paste into a Paste from Word box in the blog editor and click Insert.

When the blog is saved any lines in the table and column width data will be stripped out so there is no point in worrying about such features. Resulting spacings between columns are minimal but this problem can be fixed by inserting blank columns. An example looks like this in Writer:

and displays in a blog thus:

Text in the columns wraps to suit page width so the same technique can be used to get a reasonable looking list with sub headings.

Blogging pictures

A final point that may or may not be widely known among bloggers who post Visible to anyone in the world entries featuring pictures is that any graphics hosted on the OU site are in fact invisible to everyone in the world not logged-in to the OU. Currently the only way around this problem is to put graphics externally, with Google say, and insert a URL link in the document. Please fix this OU.

(this has now been fixed, apparently: thanks OU!)

Visible to anyone in the world:

Turkish cat - Selçuk - my photo