How to spice up your Meeting Place posts

Now that you’ve decided on a topic to share with our Meeting Place members, you may want to ‘spice it up’ a little and make it stand out. Here’s a quick tutorial how you can do just that.

You will notice at the top of the ‘Opening Post’ box (below) that there appears a ‘B’, ‘I’, U, ABC, A (with a coloured line beneath), a chain link icon and a broken chain link and lastly, a green tree icon. This is your post toolbar.

Screen shot of Meeting Place opening post box

 

Post toolbar controls

The ‘B’ allows you to make your type bold. Simply select the text that you want to appear in bold and click the ‘B’ icon.

The ‘I’ italicises your selected text. To do this, select the text you want to be italicised and click the ‘I’ icon.

The ‘U’ icon will underline your selected text. Just select your text for underlining and click the ‘U’ icon.

The ABC icon is your strikethrough function. Simply select the type you wish to strike through and click the ABC icon.

The A with a coloured underline is where you can change the colour of the text in which your post appears. You can select the text you want to colour, then click on the A and choose from an array of preformatted shades, or you can click on ‘More Colours’ and choose your own.

The chain link icon is what you use to link text to an external page. If you want to add a link to your post, simply select the type you wish to link, then click the chain link icon. The following box will appear.

 

Screen grab of Meeting Place edit link box 

Now, in the ‘Link URL’ field, enter the URL (web address) to where you want your text to link. Then click on the ‘Target’ dropdown menu and select ‘Open in new window (_blank)’. That’s all you have to do to link text in your post.

And if you decide to unlink your link, highlight the link and click on the broken chain link icon at the top of the ‘Opening Post’ box. 

Now comes the fun part: uploading images to your post. Click on the green tree icon at the top right hand side of the ‘Opening Post’ box and this window will appear.

 

Screen grab of the Meeting Place image upload box

YourLifeChoices doesn’t host images directly, as it takes up a considerable amount of space and significantly slows down our server, meaning slower load times for all of our members. But that doesn’t stop us from giving you the option to use images in your Meeting Place posts, you’ll just need to provide a URL from an external image-hosting service, such as Flickr, Google Photos, or Photobucket (for some ideas, see the recommendations from Lifehacker).

Once you’ve uploaded your image to your favourite photo-sharing website, simply right click on the image and choose ‘Copy link address’ or ‘Copy image URL’ or similar. Then, in the image upload window, click in the ‘Image URL’ field and paste your link address. If you’d like to give an image description or title, that’s fine, but not necessary. Then click the green ‘Insert’ button at the bottom right hand side of the image upload box and you have an image in your Meeting Place post! Nice one!

When you upload images, it’s best to make sure that they are no wider than 600 pixels but, once again, our image resize function should take care of that for you.

So, now you know how to make your Meeting Place posts look extra special, why not get started with your own post? If you have any queries or need help with posting, please don’t hesitate to contact the Meeting Place Moderator.