Article: Twins Daily Primer: The Blogs

[Brock Beauchamp]

This is the second Twins Daily primer article – the first being the basics of the new Twins Daily – and today, we’ll focus on the user blog experience. How it has changed, how it hasn’t changed, and how to get the most out of your blogging experience on Twins Daily. Even some of the veteran bloggers might want to take a look at these tips, as a few things have changed with the new system.First, you’ll want to create your blog if you haven’t done so already. Just hop over to the blog section of the site and click the “Create a Blog” button. For those of you with blogs, you’ll see an “Add Entry” button in its place.

 

Download attachment: create-blog.jpg

 

One additional feature of the new software is that you can now have multiple blogs on Twins Daily. Why would you want to do this? I have no idea; just letting you know the option exists.

 

Anyway, back to you new bloggers. Veteran bloggers, you can skip to the next paragraph. Once you’ve clicked “Create a Blog”, you will be prompted to name your blog and add a description and other related information. It’s all self-explanatory, just follow through the instructions and save your new blog. To create a new blog post, click “Add Entry” from the blog main page.

 

Okay, so now everybody has a blog and has clicked “Add Entry.” Now we’re into the meat and potatoes of the new blog system: entering a blog. I’m going to skip over a few of the more self-explanatory steps (poll creation, publish/draft, preview, etc) and focus on some of the things that might confuse a new user. As you can see below, I have conveniently numbered the points for you.

 

Download attachment: blog-entry.jpg

 

1. Tags: you can tag “like content” in the new Twins Daily. The system will automatically generate links to like content in other blogs that are similarly tagged. A useful feature that helps users find related content and drive more traffic to your personal blog. For consistency and accuracy, it's best to list each tag as "firstname lastname" with no punctuation (and without the quotes). To add multiple tags, hit the comma key and that phrase will be added as a tag.

 

2. Entry image: this is the image that will appear at the top left of your blog and in the blog main page next to your post title. You can leave this blank but the more high-quality images you use, the more likely a person is to click into your post and read it.

 

3. Entry album: this is part of our new Twins Daily gallery. You can create an album of images and include the entire album in a blog post. This drop-down menu is how you add an album.

 

4. My Media: again, a gallery option but instead of posting albums, this can be used for single images. Do you have an image you want to re-use multiple times in blog or forum posts? Add it to your gallery and re-use the image multiple times with the My Media button.

 

Video (not shown): mea culpa, I forgot to add this option to the image. To the left of My Media, you can see a green/blue square icon. If you want to add video from YouTube, MLB.com, or Vimeo, click this icon and selected Media from the drop-down list. Paste your YouTube or MLB.com URL into the Media URL field and click okay. The video will automatically insert into your post.

 

5. Paste Rich Content from your Blog: this is a brand-new feature. For security and technical reasons, allowing users to directly past images, links, and HTML markup into a post window is a bad idea. But you don’t want to re-link all your content and re-add images when pasting from your own blog. That’s lame. Click this text and paste your blog content into the generated window. Click okay. The system strips out all bad mark-up language (fonts, colors, etc.) and keeps your links, text effects (bold, italics, etc), and images. Super-handy.

 

6. Attach Files: obviously, being allowed just one image for your blog entry isn’t enough for long and/or complex entries. Need to add more images? Place your cursor where you want the image to appear, upload a new image using Attach Files, and then click Add to Article. The image will generate where you placed the cursor in the editing window.

 

After you’re done editing your post, click either Save Draft or Publish and your entry will be saved. Publish the entry to allow other users to read the blog entry.

 

Those are the blog basics. If you have questions or tips/tricks I missed in this article, be sure to post in the comments section!

 

Click here to view the article

[Paul Pleiss]

Is there a way to add a signature type deal to the end of your blog posts without putting it in manually? Really neat if there's a way.

 

What about linking directly from my outside blog to my TD blog. Like let's say I blog over at my independent site www.baseballtwins.com, is there a way to get those posts to automatically appear on my TD blog?

[Brock Beauchamp]

Is there a way to add a signature type deal to the end of your blog posts without putting it in manually? Really neat if there's a way.

 

I started work on something just like that last night. Haven't gotten it working yet but I expect to have something put together within a week or so.

[jorgenswest]

I need help with tables.

 

I have a table in excel (or word) but it looks awful in the preview.

 

Thanks

[Brock Beauchamp]

Tables cannot be pasted into the blogs at this point. I've tried to get the BBCode working on them multiple times but for some reason, it just won't take. I haven't had time to sit down and sort it out properly.

[mdewolf18]

Embedding video from YouTube in the blogs doesn't appear to work correctly. I tried the instructions above, with both the straight URL and with the embed code. With embed code, it's stripped out and nothing appears. With the straight URL, it just inserts a hyperlink.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks!

 

[formerly33]

Embedding video from YouTube in the blogs doesn't appear to work correctly. I tried the instructions above, with both the straight URL and with the embed code. With embed code, it's stripped out and nothing appears. With the straight URL, it just inserts a hyperlink.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks!

Click on the media button in the top row of your menu bar ("Special BBCode"), select "Media," and insert a YouTube link under "Media URL." Easy peasy.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOejCFqzHro

Edited April 7, 2016 by always33

[mdewolf18]

Yeah ... that didn't work for me ...

 

http://twinsdaily.com/blog/933/entry-8270-realstoriesmn-that-time-bud-selig-wanted-to-ban-maple-bats/

 

It just gives me the link text.

 

Any other ideas? I followed the directions in the post exactly.

[formerly33]

Is this the embed code you're getting?

 

 

If that doesn't work, I'm just going to assume this is a glitch in the system which Brock needs to take care of.

Edited April 7, 2016 by always33

[mdewolf18]

Ah ha. It's the "watch" text and the query parameters that weren't there. 

 

Here's the bug for others ... if you go to your video in YouTube, right click and "get video URL" you get just the URL of your video: https://youtu.be/ZCJJTFeKXSo for example. Then if you insert that using the instructions above you get "https://youtu.be/ZCJJTFeKXSo" and no video.

 

Instead, you have to select the link from your browser window when you are watching the video, and you'll get the format of URL that the special code likes and voila ... video.

 

Thanks!

 

Matt

Edited April 7, 2016 by mdewolf18

[Otto von Ballpark]

 

Tables cannot be pasted into the blogs at this point. I've tried to get the BBCode working on them multiple times but for some reason, it just won't take. I haven't had time to sit down and sort it out properly.

It appears this still doesn't work, correct?  I just tried to post a table using the "Paste Rich Content" link and copying and pasting from Word, and it looks perfect when I paste it into the editor, but it gets completely messed up when I save the draft.

 

So instead, I am trying to upload screenshots of the tables, but that hasn't worked for me either in my blog entry.  I keep getting the error "The server returned an error during upload" when I click "Attach This File", although the same procedure works perfectly in regular forum posts, just not the blog entries.  Case in point:

 

I have tried it on multiple systems (Mac, Windows) and browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox), with multiple file types (JPG, PNG), all well below the file size limit -- all return the same error when trying to attach files to a blog entry.  It's the exact same error you get when you try to attach without selecting a file with the "Browse" button first, although I clearly do select a file and the filename is displayed next to the "Browse" button when I attempt to attach.

 

I finally found the gallery option, and was able to upload my image to a gallery album and insert it via My Media.  A little wonky, but it works.  Would be great to simply be able to post tables, though, for stats.

Edited May 4, 2016 by spycake

[Hosken Bombo Disco]

 

It appears this still doesn't work, correct?  I just tried to post a table using the "Paste Rich Content" link and copying and pasting from Word, and it looks perfect when I paste it into the editor, but it gets completely messed up when I save the draft.

 

So instead, I am trying to upload screenshots of the tables, but that hasn't worked for me either in my blog entry.  I keep getting the error "The server returned an error during upload" when I click "Attach This File", although the same procedure works perfectly in regular forum posts, just not the blog entries.  Case in point:

blog-attach-error.png

 

I have tried it on multiple systems (Mac, Windows) and browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox), with multiple file types (JPG, PNG), all well below the file size limit -- all return the same error when trying to attach files to a blog entry.  It's the exact same error you get when you try to attach without selecting a file with the "Browse" button first, although I clearly do select a file and the filename is displayed next to the "Browse" button when I attempt to attach.

 

I finally found the gallery option, and was able to upload my image to a gallery album and insert it via My Media.  A little wonky, but it works.  Would be great to simply be able to post tables, though, for stats.

what's the wonky way to upload an image to a blog? I'm not quite connecting the dots in your last paragraph. Thanks!

[Otto von Ballpark]

 

what's the wonky way to upload an image to a blog? I'm not quite connecting the dots in your last paragraph. Thanks!

Clicking on your username, then "My Gallery", then upload.  Once that is done, you have to go back to your blog entry, click "My Media", and find your uploaded image.  I just thought it was a little wonky compared to the normal uploading of images on posts, where it can be done right on the same page using "More Reply Options".

[Otto von Ballpark]

In any case, I figured out how to use BB code for basic tables thanks to this post:

http://twinsdaily.com/topic/22417-article-stewart-and-harrison-quieting-critics/?p=479445

 

Although it would be nice to add styling like borders, highlighted rows/columns, etc.

[Will Goodwin]

I'm having a hard time finding the "Create a Blog" button on the new site since the screenshots in this post are from 2014. Could you point me in the right direction?