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Blog
Justin Lund
posted this on October 16, 2011 12:02
Blog Overview
The blog in Nimbus is fully integrated into your site. There's no need to maintain a separate blog site. This allows you to keep a cohesive web presence managed from one place.
Title
This is the title of the blog post. It's visible to everyone and used in the creation of the URL of the post.
Permalink
By default, the URL of the blog post is based upon the title and the SEO Permalink Settings. The specific URL can be modified by editing the permalink. Learn more about permalinks and SEO in this knowledgebase article.
Content
The content section is where you create your blog post. At the top is the content toolbar, allowing you to modify the text styles, font, and add media.
The content toolbar also includes the Advanced HTML Editing button. This provides you with the flexibility to to edit the source for the blog post. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility! The following warning is displayed when clicking the Advanced button the first time:
Advanced HTML Editing allows you access to the code for your pages and posts, including the HTML and inline CSS. Changes and edits to the raw HTML must be coded by hand, but doing so can provide greater flexibility.
This feature gives you freedom to play, but be careful - with freedom comes responsibility! If you make a mess of your page's layout, you'll have to clean it up yourself; Nimbus Customer Support cannot provide support for website pages and blog posts which have been manually edited.
Images
If you'd like to add an image to your blog post, you can drag it to the file upload drop zone on the right side of the page or select it from your Assets Gallery. This is a special gallery for you to upload images you want to use in blog posts or web pages. Once an image is uploaded into the Assets gallery, click the gallery icon in the content toolbar to insert images from the gallery into the blog post. Double-click the image to edit its attributes.
Video
If you'd like to add video to your blog post, you can use one of our video integrations like YouTube or Vimeo. Once you've linked your account, videos uploaded to these sites can be inserted into a blog post by clicking on the video icon.
Publishing
Draft - If you find yourself unable to finish a blog post before you're ready to publish it, you can save the post as a draft by clicking the "Save" button. The post is saved for you to work on later.
Preview - Once you've saved a post, you can preview it using the "Preview" button. This will open the blog post on your site so that you can see how it looks.
Publish Now - If you're satisfied by the way it looks, you can publish the post immediately by clicking the "Publish" button.
Publish Later - If you'd like to schedule the post to be published at a later date, click the "Edit" link and choose a date and time for when you'd like the post to be published. Then click the "Publish" button. The post will not be visible on your blog until the date and time you specified.
Delete - Should you need to delete a blog post, click the "Delete" link in the lower-left of the Publish window. This is only available for posts that have been saved or published.
Authors
If you have more than one user defined in Nimbus, you can choose the author of the post from the drop-down menu. The name of the author will be shown on the blog post. The author's name will also be clickable, bringing the visitor to a list of all blog posts written by that author.
Categories and Tags
Categories and tags are ways to group blog posts with similar content. Learn more about categories and tagging in this knowledgebase article.
Comments
Comments can be enabled or disabled for each blog post. Simply check or uncheck the "Allow comments" checkbox. Learn more about comments in this knowledgebase article.
Adding files to Posts
Nimbus allows you to upload and host files. To upload a file, go to the Files > Files menu, and upload the file you want to use. Once the file is uploaded, right-click on the view/play button and copy the URL (also known as "link" or "URL", depending on the browser). You can then go back to your post editor and create a link to your file with the web address. For more information on using files in Nimbus, click here.
Comments
Is there a way to make categories in the blog without having to create a post in the category? My goal is to create a category for Studio products, then sub categories for our product categories and then add each product as posts inside the proper sub-category.
Now for some reason, I added a category attempted to add a sub category "photo prints" but instead of one, there are now 14 of these categories, how do we delete blog categories or at least rename them?
OK< so after working more inside of this section, I have found the issue. When adding categories, there is not action that allows you to know your new category has been created. No refresh, no saving arrow, and the without a refresh it does not auto populate in the list of categories. You must either refresh the screen in order to see any type of changes take place. Still need to find a way to delete categories that are duplicated several times.
Hey David,
We're actually going to remove categories all together. They're really redundant with tags, and tags are more flexible. Stay tuned :)
Tags may be ore flexible, but you will find by suing tags rather categories or the combination of the two may lead to the cross over of incorrect articles when viewing a page. This, being if an article is created to explain a service/ package and the tags in that specific article might also match the tags in another area crossing the information when viewing them.
Currently, I have my site built around the combination of the two., this way my pages show only the article in certain categories or groups of categories, and then show a related articles section according to the tags used. This allows for a clean coherent way to view a section of information and at the same time find related off topic articles.
You can imagine how it will be an issue if a potential client is looking through packages tagged with "print" and wants to only view services in the packages area, but if tagged with prints, will then be inundated with articles from products or even the blogs that include the tag "print" and will be very confusing in the long run.
I am looking at this from pour perspective and how we wish to showcase our service and product information. Again, if you take a look at my site, http://kalistaimaging.com you can see exactly what I mean by flipping through any of the service or product sections.
How can we make the blog images bigger? I imported my wordpress images and they are much larger than the images it allows me to post in a new blog post. I tried the image values but it just made my images squished or really tall even though I entered the same values as the imported (from wordpress) images. Thanks.
Chris - that's a feature that's specific to the theme you are using. Since you're using Crystalized go to each blog post and click on source and then add the following code to the post.
<style type="text/css">
.categories { display: none; }
div.blog-list {
float: left;
width: 850px;
} </style>
If you'd like to do the same thing with pages, instead of blog posts, you can do it by adding this code.
<style type="text/css">
.recent-posts { display: none; }
div.content {
float: left;
width: 850px;
}</style>
These are little tricks that David Wolf over at Wolf Snap designs shared on a webinar a few weeks ago. Just make sure you go into source editing mode and the code will work for you. Good luck!
Awesome! Thanks so much Ben, you just changed my whole opinion on Nimbus :)
No problem Chris. Happy to help!
If you don't add the code to each blog post in Nimbus it will still work on a per page basis. For instance, if you have your blog roll set to show 5 blog posts per page then you just add it once during the 5 posts and all of them will display full width without the sidebar. However, if you click on the individual blog post and it opens by itself then the post will show the sidebar. Not sure if that makes sense but basically just make sure it add that code to each blog post and you'll be set.
Chris — glad you're happy. This solution is a little "hackety" but we've got a plan.
Here's what we're going to (hopefully) in the next release. We're creating "widgets" that will allow you to put little snippits of code in various places on your website. These widgets will allow you to put things like your twitter stream, tag clouds, secondary navigation, and a (drum roll) "Fresh from the Blog" widget.
So, what we're going to do is put the "fresh from the blog" widget into the out-of-the-box Crystalized theme. And then all you have to do is delete it in the user interface. Hooray!
So, can someone tell me what size ( pixel dimensions ) I should make my files to upload for galleries and for blog posting. Thanks!
Can I add some kind of link for people to click to follow my posts? Also are the tags on the posts for SEO or for linking posts? and is three a way to add keywords to post?
Re: inserting VIDEO to a post
I checked to make sure my Vimeo account is linked in my settings, and it is. When I'm in the post I want to insert the video into, I click on the camera and I get a "Select Provider" window that shows the vimeo button. I click on it and it does nothing. ??
Hey Angee,
Do you have Vimeo configured here https://nimbus.shootq.com/settings/integration/?
yyyyyyup
I get the window that asks me to "select provider" with the Vimeo button - my curser even turns into a hand for clicking, but nothing happens when I click.
I just tested on my site and it looks like I'm getting the same error. The YouTube button works but Vimeo is a no go. Guess I can't be of any help.
Ugh. Thanks though, Ben!
No problem! Sorry I couldn't help.
Duh. Just now submitted a help request officially about the vimeo to blog issue.
Oh wow.... Sorry all! I was just made aware of this forum. I'm looking into things and will reply once I know more.
A few questions on creating a new blog post. How can I quickly add images? When I upload the images it go to assets and then I have add each image individual. Isn't there a way to a a group of images? Also, what are the default setting for the blog width and can it be changes? What image sizes do you recommend?
Lastly, when I hit preview it makes my post go away and does not give me a preview. Same problem when I hit save... it's seems there is a glitch somewhere... :)
Hey, for some reason my blog posts are not showing up on the home page under fresh from the blog. Am I supposed to do something in order to make this happen? The blog posts I've created show up fine when I click on blog and yes they are published.
Thanks, Cayce