The Blogging Icons Explained

Community Highlights Travellerspoint The Blogging Icons Explained

New bloggers on Travellerspoint can struggle a little with some of the formatting options available. To try and make this a little easier, this blog post will hopefully explain the various options available to you.

First things first, here is a screengrab of what the form looks like when you are about to start writing an entry. Ignore the boring text. I wasn't feeling inspired ok?

the blog editing form

The main thing you need to note in that screengrab is the row of icons directly above the main text area. A large A followed by a smaller A, then a B, I and so on. I'm going to step through those icons and explain what you can do with them.

There are two ways to use them. Either:

1. Highlight a block of text, then click the icon
2. Place your cursor somewhere in your entry, then click the icon

The Heading Icons

- A large heading, like the one just above this
- A not-quite-as-large heading like the one just below this

The Other Icons

- Bold text

- Italic text

- A link to the guide or as a way to ensure a plain http link is made clickable. This is a special one. You can highlight the name of a place and then click on this icon and it will automatically create a link to our travel guide article about the location. For example, the highlight the text "Amsterdam", then click on the icon and you end up with something in your entry that looks like this: [[Amsterdam]]. When you then preview this, you will notice it turns it into a link like this: Amsterdam. A major caveat here - the guide article needs to exist or you'll just create a broken link. You can check if it exists by creating the link, previewing the entry, then clicking the generated link. Major locations usually exist, so you can enter them pretty confidently.

Now the other use of that icon is to make ordinary links clickable. When you enter a regular url like https://www.travellerspoint.com , it just shows up as an unclickable piece of text. But if you click on the chain icon it will wrap it in those square brackets and hey presto, now it's clickable: https://www.travellerspoint.com, which brings me to the next icon

- This is really the main one you want to use for regular links. Either highlight a piece of text that you want to make clickable, or place your cursor where you want to insert a link. Then click the icon. It will ask you for the URL (the link) that you want to insert. If you didn't highlight any text before clicking on it, the result will be something like this: [[https://www.travellerspoint.com|Your text to link here...]]. What you need to do is edit the "Your text to link here..." text and replace it with something useful, ie: [[https://www.travellerspoint.com|Awesome travel website]] which when published looks like this: Awesome travel website

- This icon allows you to insert photos into your entry. Once you click on it, you should see a popup appear with your photos in it. It looks a lot like your photo management page, but with links to insert the photos. Next to each photo there are typically three links: "Thumbnail", "Regular", "Large". Click on whatever size you want to insert in your entry. It will result in a string like this inserted into your entry: [img=https://photos.travellerspoint.com/4/sam8.jpg] Pretty boring looking, but when published that's a cool photo of Sam and I with our feet in a bowl.

- This icon allows you to insert a video. You can insert photos from a few different places where you can upload them (Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr) and they should play OK in your entry.

- This icon allows you to embed one of your trip maps in the entry. You can even zoom in to the exact area that you want to show and insert that. Like this map of a road trip we did in Queensland

.

- This allows you to insert a "quote" in your text. Some of the templates show this nicely. Others not so much. Try it out if you like. It can be a nice way to highlight a bit of text.

- Use this to create a list. Each time you click it a new list item is created. In your entry when you're editing, the list should look like this:

* Item 1
* Item 2

- Similar, but a numbered list

- Align the text to the left. Kind of the default anyway, so the use of this is probably quite limited unless your blog design is set up differently to most

- Center align a block of text

- Right align a block of text

- Float some content to the left. Typically a photo or video. The text that comes right afterwards should then wrap down to the right of the photo.

- Float some content to the right. Again, usually a photo or video. The text that comes right afterwards should then wrap down to the left of the photo.

- Underline some text
- Strike through some words, I mean one word.
- Superscript, for example ^this
- Subscript, for example _this
- Code, used to style a bit of text to look like code. Probably not relevant to most anyone on here, but I use it sometimes.

And that about wraps it up!

Hopefully that helps you get the hang of the blog entry formatting features available on Travellerspoint.

If you have any follow up questions, or have spotted some mistakes in this article, please join this discussion in our forum

_{On a total side note, you can also use all the emoticons that exist in the forum editor as well. There just isn't a handy way to insert them, so you pretty much need to memorise those if you want them. I'll sign off with a pirate.}