#i fear that soon ill just become a mouse blog..

[shi0n]

just received a pic of my mice.. cant wait until theyre old enough to come home 🐭🐭🐭

[jessicatuckerman]

Thus far you’ve put together some posts on your own, made some fancy images for them, and scheduled them for some date in the future. Now let’s clean it all up.

This… will be my most catty post about blogging. I have many visual preferences and coming from a new media background certainly does not help my snobbery, so I’d like to apologize to all the people I’m about to offend.

Images

Let’s get this out of the way: DO. NOT. JUST. PLOP. YOUR. IMAGES. IN . YOUR. POSTS. WITHOUT. ALIGNING. THEM. PLEASE. AND. THANK YOU.

There is nothing more aggravating to me than people who just plop photos down in their posts without a care of how it all looks after it’s published.

Case in point.

Whelp! There it is. Just sitting on the side of the post, breaking up the text.

And it bugs me to no end.

So let’s talk about moving these images around so that you can have a cleaner looking product.

Alignment

So you’ve just uploaded a photo and now it’s sitting in your post. There are four ways to align your photo.

Left (#1)

Center (#2)

Right (#3)

No-Alignment (See earlier photo)

#gallery-0-19 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-19 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-19 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-19 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

I’m going to pull some back copies from GoodReads. Take a look at each alignment. Which looks better to you?

A Voyage to Avalon (image right)

A mysterious curse sparks a dangerous quest in book two of the epic middle grade series ALA Booklist called “a charming blend of Arthurian legend and Brian Jacques’s Redwall series.”

Young mouse Calib Christopher has nearly completed his training to become a squire to the Knights of Camelot when news of a deadly plague reaches the castle. Soon all of Camelot is showing signs of the illness, animals and humans alike. Desperate to find a cure, Calib and his friend Cecily set off on a voyage to find the healing land of Avalon. But even as their journey takes them over land and sea, back at home, Calib’s human friend Galahad discovers that the true enemy may have already found a way inside the castle walls.…

Serafina and the Splintered Heart (image left)

The storms are coming….

Something has happened to Serafina. She has awoken into a darkness she does not understand, scarred from a terrible battle, only to find that life at Biltmore Estate has changed in unimaginable ways. Old friends do unthinkable things and enemies seem all around.

A mysterious threat moves towards Biltmore, a force without a name, bringing with it violent storms and flooding that stands to uproot everything in its path. Serafina must uncover the truth about what has happened to her and find a way to harness her strange new powers before it’s too late.

With only days to achieve the impossible, Serafina fights to reclaim herself as the Guardian of Biltmore, friend of Braeden, daughter of her Pa, and heroine of the Blue Ridge Mountains and all the folk and creatures that call it home.

In the epic third installment of Robert Beatty’s #1 bestselling series, Serafina takes her rightful place among literary champions as she battles fiercely to defend all she loves and become everything that she is meant to be.

Hunting Prince Dracula (image center)

In this hotly anticipated sequel to the haunting #1 bestseller Stalking Jack the Ripper, bizarre murders are discovered in the castle of Prince Vlad the Impaler, otherwise known as Dracula. Could it be a copycat killer…or has the depraved prince been brought back to life?

Following the grief and horror of her discovery of Jack the Ripper’s true identity, Audrey Rose Wadsworth has no choice but to flee London and its memories. Together with the arrogant yet charming Thomas Cresswell, she journeys to the dark heart of Romania, home to one of Europe’s best schools of forensic medicine…and to another notorious killer, Vlad the Impaler, whose thirst for blood became legend.

But her life’s dream is soon tainted by blood-soaked discoveries in the halls of the school’s forbidding castle, and Audrey Rose is compelled to investigate the strangely familiar murders. What she finds brings all her terrifying fears to life once again.

Shadow Weaver (no alignment)

The shadows that surround us aren’t always as they seem…

Emmeline has grown up with a gift. Since the time she was a baby she has been able to control shadows. And her only friend and companion is her own shadow, Dar.

Disaster strikes when a noble family visits their home and offers to take Emmeline away and cure her of magic. Desperate not to lose her shadows, she turns to Dar who proposes a deal: Dar will change the noble’s mind, if Emmeline will help her become flesh as she once was. Emmeline agrees but the next morning the man in charge is in a coma and all that the witness saw was a long shadow with no one nearby to cast it. Scared to face punishment, Emmeline and Dar run away.

With the noble’s guards on her trail, Emmeline’s only hope of clearing her name is to escape capture and perform the ritual that will set Dar free. But Emmeline’s not sure she can trust Dar anymore, and it’s hard to keep secrets from someone who can never leave your side.

The first in a dark middle-grade fantasy duology, MarcyKate Connolly weaves a tale filled with shadows, danger, and magic that has the feel of a new classic.

I prefer my covers to be aligned to the right so that the text flows into them, but left works just as well. What doesn’t work are the center and the unaligned images. There are giant, ugly blank spaces with nothing in them just calling attention to the image. It makes the image separate from your content when really it’s a vital part of your post.

So please.

PLEASE.

Align your images.

In WordPress, just click on the image to bring up a quick menu that will allow you to select the image’s alignment just like aligning text.

Galleries

WordPress (and other blogging platforms usually) offers a few choices on galleries for images. And hey, if you’re doing a cute bookish round up of adorable clothes, crafts, your favorite bookstagram posts this week, then galleries are a great way to publish an image heavy post.

One thing I hate to see, are just individual images. One right after the other just taking up a sloppy amount of space with different dimensions, cutting off text, aligning weird on the page like someone just put glue on them and dropped them on the page. Galleries and Alignment take seconds–literal seconds–to do. So there is no excuse.

There are all sorts of galleries to choose from too. From a slideshow (which takes up minimal space) to tiled columns (which can take up a lot of space). Just go to upload your media and select multiple images.

Tiled Mosaic

Tiled Columns

Circles

Thumbnails

#gallery-0-23 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-23 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 25%; } #gallery-0-23 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-23 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Slideshow

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  Formatting Your Posts: Part 1 Thus far you've put together some posts on your own, made some fancy images for them, and scheduled them for some date in the future.