Hello Everybody!

For the first of my "Learn with Lakis" blogs, I'm going to show you how to make a very simple MySymi blog. The blog that you'll watch me create consists of nothing more than a few lines of text and three pictures...I'll miss out all the complex stuff about making text look jazzy, or having YouTube videos working in your blog...I hope to come onto those at a later date. For now, I want to encourage as many of you as possible to become MySymi bloggers by showing you how easy it is to write about a recent Symi holiday, put up your holiday photos, tell us all which restaurants, bars and beaches you enjoyed, or just to say "hello!".

First of all, you need to register for a SymiGreece account. This is easy and all you have to do is click the "register" button below the pretty banner picture above. Once you've registered, you can send us an email at info@symigreece.com and ask us to upgrade you to a blogger's account. We'll do this very quickly, and once we have, your MySymi-ing days can begin!

Throughout this lesson you'll see "thumbnail"s of pictures. If you click on these, you'll see a snapshot of a section of my own screen, illustrating certain steps in the blog-creation process.

OK...let's begin!

First of all, you need to login to your SymiGreece account...



...I always select the "60 days" from the "remember me" list so I don't have to keep on logging in every time I come to the SymiGreece site...



If you share your computer and don't want the other users to use your SymiGreece account then you'll either have to logout when you've finished or choose the "No" option in the "remember me" list.

Once you're logged in, click "MySymi" in the bar above the banner picture to go to the MySymi area.



You'll see a list of all the latest blogs that have been put on MySymi, and at the very top you can click on the words "My personal weblog" to take you to your own MySymi space.



As you can see from the picture (click on the thumbnail icon below!) I had no written no blogs so far. To add in a new blog entry, I clicked on "Create a new entry"



Up popped the blog entry area.



It had a space for me to give a title to my blog entry, a panel of controls to format the text and do whacky things, the all important link to the "My Files" area, and most importantly of all, the "Submit" button which I had to click once I was happy that my blog entry was ready to appear on the SymiGreece MySymi website.

I'm not going to talk about the panel of controls today, except to point out the magnifying glass control right at the end...that allows you to have a preview of how your blog will appear on MySymi before you've submitted it, and so is useful. More of that later...

The blog I am going to show you how to make has got 3 pictures of me in it. These had been scaled to be no bigger than 858 pixels wide using Microsoft Photo Editor which comes with Microsoft Office. There are plenty of free image editing packages that you can find online to scale your photos; PIXresizer is easy to use, but if you have a fast internet connection and want to use one of the many "online" resizers, then Shrinkpicures works well.

My three photos needed to be uploaded to the MySymi site. To do this, I clicked where it said "My Files" in the picture above. The MyFiles window appeared separately. When doing your own blogs, I recommend you keep this window open until you've finished your blog as it's the place where you'll also be inserting your pictures into your blog text.



The "My Files" window has several distinct sections. As all the photos you upload to MySymi will be kept in folders which you can organise, the first section is the Folder area. This allows you to select the folder you want to upload photos to, or to view the contents of a folder that already exists.

The next section is where you can browse on your computer to find the photos you want to upload.

The third section allows you to create a new folder, and to give it a title.

Finally, there is a long list of the types of files that will work correctly in a MySymi blog, specifcally the photo and video formats, as well as other types of file that will appear as a clickable link in your blog text.

I wanted to upload my three photographs, but as this was the first time I had used MySymi, I needed to create a folder to put them in. This was easily done by going to the "Create a Folder" area. I gave my folder a name and a description and then clicked "create".



I went to the Folder area and I selected the folder I had just created as that was where I wanted to put the photos I was about to upload.



I then clicked on the "browse" button of the first line in the "Upload a file" area, and browsed on my computer to the folder where I'd put my three photos.



I selected the file and then went and clicked the "browse" buttons of the second and third lines to select the other two photos.



I gave each of my photos a description, and when I was satisfied, I clicked "upload".

The uploading took a few seconds, and then I was shown the following list which confirmed that my photos had uploaded with no problems.



Satisfied that all was OK, I then clicked on the name of the folder containing my photos in the Folder list.

A list opened up showing me the photos that I had uploaded. At the far right were the controls that I needed to insert the photos into my blog...don't worry about those just yet, I'll get onto them soon.



Leaving the "My Files" window open, I went back to the text window for my blog entry and began to write my blog. I wrote a few lines of text, and then wanted to insert my first photo.



I went back to the "My Files" window (which I'd left open...if I hadn't, I'd just have had to re-open it by pressing the "My Files" button again, and selecting the folder with the photos) and had to choose whether I wanted to insert the first photo as a thumbnail, like the ones you can see here, or to have the photo itself. Next to the name of each photo in my folder were three controls...each has an arrow on them. The first control is green, and if you click that, you're asking to insert the photo as a thumbnail. The second control is light blue, and if you click that you're asking to insert the whole photo. We won't worry about the third (grey) control in this lesson.

I clicked the middle control next to the first of my photos, as I wanted to insert it completely (not as just a thumbnail) into my blog. Nothing appeared to happen...but it had! I went back to the window with myblog text and saw this...



An extra line had been added which contained instructions to tell MySymi to insert the photo among the blog text, rather than inserting the photo itself.

I proceeded in this way, adding more lines of text and the second photo. I decided to add the third photo as a thumbnail by clicking the first of the three controls instead of the middle one this time.



Before I submitted the blog, I hit the little magnifying glass control so I could preview what my blog would look like.



If I had wanted to go back and edit anything, I could have just hit the magnifying glass control again, but as I was happy, I just hit the submit button.

So...that's how to create a very simple blog! You can experiment with the controls if you already know about the bcode format that is used, or you can wait until my next lesson!

Happy Blogging!

Woof!!