For Bloggers
Hello Bridge Blogging Bloggers 🙂
You may remember that I turned your blogging life upside down last November 🙁 I’ve tried to keep a low profile since then. The trouble is, the brain starts to atrophy if one doesn’t stir things up and try new things. So, I’m about to change things for you again. I am hoping that the changes are for the better — the gang at bridgeblogging.com would not let me do this if they did not think so as well.
In preparation for the change, I’ve added a page to the site. You can see a link to it up at the top of your browser window when you are viewing the Bridge Blogging Home page — FOR BLOGGERS. You are welcome to browse it whether you are bridge blogger or not, but it will primarily be of interest to those of you who maintain blogs on our site. On that page you will find links to two PDF documents that somehow seemed to have got lost over time. One is an introduction for new bloggers and the other is about creating BBO bridge movies. Both will probably be updated in the near future, but they are both still very relevant.
The other link on that page is to page with the long-winded title, Creating and Editing Posts — TIps and Techniques. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself! While it does describe some general techniques and what the WordPress Visual Editor is doing, what you may find interesting involves a big change we are about to make…
We are about to upload a completely rewritten version our bridge tools — Bridge Tools II. You can see images that show what the new editor tool-bars and some of the tool dialogs look like.
In the process, the WordPress Visual Editor will be upgraded to the most up to date version — it was awkward to do that previously as it breaks the existing bridge tools badly. I felt putting effort into revising the bridge tools would be better spent than making the existing version play better with the visual editor.
Our intent is to make your life easier and improve the appearance of bridge diagrams — essentially, allow you to create more professional-looking articles easily.
I intend implementing this change Sunday evening (June 3rd).
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Bridge-related
Very nice visual interface!
Any chance you can make the hand-diagram creator simply spit out html so that those of us blogging elsewhere can use this tool?
Hi Lak, thank you for the compliment.
There are two catches to your request: it might be confusing for some bloggers and the Bridge Tools rely on “style sheets” that they load into WordPress. During testing, I do have the dialog display the raw HTML in an “alert” dialog just before inserting it into the post. But I have an HTML template file that loads those style sheets (and I just copy-and-paste the HTML into the template). I’ll think about it, but I cannot make any promises.
JRG
Lak — we always welcome new bridge bloggers. What tools are you currently using to write your bridge blogs? We might be able to export your existing blogs and import them into our system and then you can continue your blog where you left off using our new blog tools. Email us if this is something that you might consider :).
Luise,
I currently use Blogger (the blogging tool by Google). If you click on my name in this comment, you should be taken to my blog. The posts show up on this site as “other blogs”.
I’m definitely willing to migrate, especially to a system that has bridge-specific tools.
JRG, this is the hacked up tool that I currently use: http://cimms.ou.edu/~lakshman/bridge/handlayout.htm
but I see your point about using CSS. Definitely cleaner that way.
Lak
Hi John,
I tried to link CBF.ca to my post bridge week 2014 but failed. Any suggestion?
Thanks,
Michael.
Hi Michael,
Here is how you do that.
1) Write the text you want to appear on the page (which will become the clickable link).
2) Select all that text (click and drag the mouse pointer).
3) When you have done that, there are some icons in the tool bar. One of those looks like two links of a chain. It will be inactive (grey) unless some text is selected. Click on it.
4) Fill in the details on the little pop-up dialog that appears (e.g. the URL as “http://cbf.ca”)
5) Click on the “Add Link” button in the lower right.
Let me know if you have any further problems or questions.
Cheers,
JRG