Hi Peninsula Toastmasters!
I am very pleased with the warm reception back to the club as well as to this new media types such as this blog. It’ll take a little getting used to but once you see the method, people will be adding all sorts of comments, documents, tools and features to make this a very interactive and worthwhile repository of knowledge….And as every member knows in our club, there is quite a bit of that in this club!
Here’s how to put up MEDIA which is what all the documents, photos, audio, graphics, videos and anything else that I have missed in this short list. First of all, media is stored in a directory (called Media) that you access from the control panel. You need to be a contributor to add content so if you have some, I’ll convert your ‘subscriber’ role to contributor and you can learn how to do this (and it’s not going to take a PhD in astro physics to learn this…just a couple of tries…I promise!). 
- Log in as your user through the “Meta” area (log in). If you’re not a registered user, it’s easy and painless. Really!
- As you logged in, your session should take you to the dashboard. Look on the left hand column for something called Media.
- Click Media and notice that it took you to the media page and expanded to expose some new options. AH HA! So that’s where they keep all the goodies… 🙂
- I’d suggest you use the WP Media Uploader (this is a plug-in that I added to the blog to make things really easy for everyone).
- Click on the Add Files button (look below the 2 tables shown in the center window). This will open a window on your PC or Mac to show you a file folder from which you select the files you’d like to copy to the blog’s Media folder. DON’T WORRY…Your files stay on your computer, but are only copied up to the Media…You still have the files where they were before.
- Depending on whether the media is a graphic/picture or a document, the graphic may not be exactly what you’re expecting. When you create a post (a new web document, or a new page), you’ll want to use this media on the post…You’ll need to ‘represent’ the media (non-photo/graphic) with a graphical icon…Use the Adobe PDF icon or the page icons in the media. Either this or you’ll need to use a link to the document’s URL (okay…I just got a little techie, but I will explain this next).
- To make this document downloadable for others (which is the idea anyhow, right?), you have to add a way to get the document from the web server…The way this is done is by clicking on something, and in this case, it’s a link, or a hypertext shortcut. It’ll take the user to the desired media (in this case, let’s say its a PDF of the new member application), and will start the download process or open the document, depending on how you’ve configured your computer.
- Adding media to your post…There is an upload/insert option above the window for creating the post. The 4 icons are things you can hover your mouse over, and read what they are for…In this case, we are inserting a document…Choose the last one, which is ‘add media’. A little mis-titled. but it works really well.
- When you clicked Add Media, you opened up a new box in the webpage that greyed out the background. In the box, you’ll see you can add media directly from your computer, from another place on the web (called from URL), from gallery (this post) or from the Media Library. In this case, use the media library. You can re-use elements in the library for many posts. If you put an image from your computer right into the post, it’s only referenced (and usable) on that post.
- Select the Media Library document and the item you’d like to share…In this case, it’s our new member application.
- Use the mis-labled ‘SHOW’ to get at the properties of this item.
- If the Link URL is blank, make sure that you click on the button “File URL’ which is where the file can be downloaded by other users…
- Click the button below that says insert into post.
- That’s it! Great Job!
- This looks hard, but I’ve literally broken down everything you need to do, step by step.
Here’s an example:
New Member App