Mastering Gather: The SiteWizard™ for Sunday 02/03

Adding images to comments can be a fun way to express yourself and your personality. However, using your own images in comments has typically required you to store, or 'host' your images on another website and link to them on Gather. Fortunately, changes in how Gather stores images now allow you to link to any image on Gather and display them in your comments or mail messages.

How is this done?

Here are the steps for adding images from your Gather image gallery to a comment:

1. Go to your image gallery.
   
2. Right-click on the desired image.
   
3. From the mouse menu, select 'Properties'.
   
4. A window will appear titled 'Element Properties'.
   
5. Click and drag through the URL (web address) located to the right of Location:
   
6. Copy the URL.
   
7. Go the the article/image/video you wish to comment on.
   
8. Type in the following: <img src=
   
9. Paste the URL you copied in step #6 immediately to the right of the equal sign.
   As an example:
   
   <img src=http://media-files.gather.com/d969/small100.jpg
   
   
10. Now add the > symbol to the end of the URL, with no spaces.
    It will then look like this:
    
    <img src=http://media-files.gather.com/d969/small100.jpg>
    
    
11. Now, add your text for the comment either above, or below the image.

Please feel free to practice here, or within the comments of an article you publish to 'Just Me'.

Notes:

You can also center the image in the comment, if desired, or reduce/enlarge the image. To learn how, visit other SiteWizard articles from this past week, or ask in a comment below.

Firefox user? -- skip steps 3, 4, 5 and 6. Instead, select "Copy Image Location" from the mouse menu. The image URL will be automatically copied to your clipboard.

Tomorrow's Tip ...more on content searching!

"I am doing a search for articles or images relating to New York City, and I end up with thousands of entries that have nothing to do with the city. What am I doing wrong?"

Gather's content search treats all keywords individually by default. Therefore, entering New York City into the content search box will return all content containing ANY of the words New, York, or City, which could be a very big list, most of which may be unrelated to your request.

Fortunately you can narrow your search results in multiple ways, leading to more accurate results. Here's How:

• Use quotation marks. Entering new york city as "new york city" will limit the search to this exact phrase, instead of the individual words.

• Use an operand. Gather search allows certain search operands, such as AND, OR and NOT. Using the AND operand (operands must be all upper case letters), you would enter new AND york AND city to locate content containing ALL of these words.

These are only two of the ways in which you can easily narrow your search on Gather, reducing time and effort in locating the content you are interested in.

Discounting the current technical glitches in the article editor, what changes would you like to see to the article editing and publishing process? ...and, do you have other suggestions for video and image publishing as well?