Posting to the BBS

[edfrank]

Hello,

The has not been as many trip reports posted to the BBS as I had hoped.  I know many of you are doing things and simply not posting.  The BBS is a little more difficult to post material to than was the older Google list.  I realize that.  I want to encourage people to make the effort and to post anyway.  Inserting photos is more time consuming using the new BBS format.  In the old list they photos could simply be embedded into a Word Document and copied to an email for sending.  In the BBS each photo needs to be uploaded individually.  

Bob Leverett's recent post about his Wyoming Trip points a way to perhaps a compromise.  Bob wrote his report as a word document then uploaded that document as an attachment to a posting that essentially read "here it is."  That is certainly much better in my opinion than not posting at all.  ENTS is a community and we need to share our stories among ourselves.

I would like to offer a compromise between the ease of posting a basic attachment and the more time it takes to embed each photo in a trip report separately.  Go ahead and post the trip report as an attached Word Document with the photos embedded in the document.  BUT take a few seconds to copy the text in the word document to the text box here on the BBS.  It only takes a few seconds to go Select All, Copy, and Paste to copy the complete text to the BBS text box.  This will allow the information to be indexed, searched, fed via the RSS feed.  

As a side note, for those of you who do not realize this - If you save a word document as an htm file (just select it in the save as function) all of the embedded images will be saved to a newly created folder that will contain copies of the original photo and a copy of the photo as it appeared resized in the Word Document.  So you can essentially batch resize all of the photos in a document in this one step.  If the document was named frog, a new folder will be created at the location where you saved the file called frog_files  That is where you will find the original and resized photos.

It really doesn't take very long to upload and embed the images in a post to the BBS, especially if they have been sized by this process.  So if you have time, go ahead and post that way.  It took me perhaps 15 minutes to convert Bob's word document attachment on Wyoming to a full post complete with embedded photos.

Ed Frank

[dbhguru]

Ed,

   I'll be giving the process a full testing over the weeks. I want to share Monica's and my experiences with fellow and lady Ents-Wnts. Doing it while on the road was just too difficult, but I'm back at home now -- so be prepared.

Bob