From: Michael Roston <michaelroston@trueslant.com>
Date: 8/17/09, 15:44
To: coates@trueslant.com, katie@trueslant.com,
Kashmir Hill <kashhill@trueslant.com>
Hello True/Slantketeers from your homepage editor,
A welcome to those of you I haven't gotten to know personally yet, and hello again to the rest of you lot - it's been awhile since I've cast forth one of my epistles.
I hope you're all enjoying your August. We're having another great month here, thanks to all of your great efforts.
I'm writing today with a few quick technical notes. It's very important that you read them.
1. Please don't schedule posts.
The latest upgrade to our system has caused the post scheduler to malfunction. Our technical team is working on correcting our database so that scheduled posts will work again. If you're traveling and need to stagger posts, save them as drafts and contact your T/S sherpa who will works something out with you.
2. Do not publish posts in 'Private' mode.
A number of contributors are publishing posts 'Privately' before they change the setting to 'Public.' When you do this, it hides the post from the activity feed, and that means we can't see it. When you change it to 'Public,' it retains the timestamp for the moment you published it privately - if hours or days go by between the 'Public' and 'Private' publishing, it gets buried underneath our avalanche of content in the activity feed in the meanwhile, so we don't see it.
Because we don't know it's there, we can't promote it on our homepage or elsewhere.
I understand that sometimes you're working on a post and aren't ready for it to go live. But if the post is published privately, anyone who navigates directly to your blog can still see it. So it's not really hidden from view.
If you want to star a post and come back to it, save it as a draft. You can always do a preview of the post by clicking on the 'Preview' button in the publishing box. But the moment you hit 'Publish,' even in 'Private' mode, it can be seen.
3. Resize images that you upload before uploading them
We have limited disk space currently. Every time you upload a photo (as opposed to choosing one from Zemanta), it accrues to your disk space. So it's important to conserve the disk quota you have been allotted on our system of 10 megabytes.
There are two ways to conserve your disk space.
First, you can reuse photos - say you use a photo of President Obama sinking a lay up several times. You can reuse it - you don't need to upload it again from your hard drive. Click on the photo button next to 'Add media' and after the box pops up, click on the 'Media Library' tab at the top. You'll find your older photos there. If you see a lot of duplicates, you should delete them.
Second, you can resize images prior to uploading them so they will be a smaller size. No Image should have dimensions bigger than 640 x 480 pixels before it's uploaded.
If you have Photoshop on your computer, remember to use the 'Save for Web' function as this chops down file sizes substantially.
If you don't have Photoshop or another image editing program on your machine, you can resize your images on the web. Resizr.com is one easy website that gives you a variety of options, but if it's not to your liking, you can find numerous others by Googling 'resize photos.'
If you have any questions about any of these notes, please drop me a line.