The Noblesvillain

Following the lead of Cliff Atkinson's Blog at Beyond Bullets, Illustrating your Blog with an eye-catching graphic can be straightforward with the right tools--tools you may already have on your desktop.

For myself, I've been working on streamlining this process.  I'll blog about how I captured the image to the left (which includes resizing and a drop shadow).

This site uses dasBlog to organzie blogs.  Follow the instructions below to add a post with an image:

1. Log into your blog and click Add Entry
2. Begin typing your entry.  When you get to the point you wish to insert an image, move to step 3.
3. In the editor, click the button which looks like this  to bring up a dialog showing a gallery of images on your site.
4. At the bottom of the gallery you'll see some controls similar to the image to the right.  Click the browse button to select the image to upload. 
5. Find an image to upload.  It should already be the size you want to use in your blog.
6. Click Upload (for me, I had to repeat steps 4 & 5 to make this happen--this seemed consistent and shows that there's a problem somewhere--I'll try to track down the problem)
7. Change the 'Align' drop-down to indicate where you'd like your image to 'float.'  Left and Right are the most often used.  Set VSpace and HSpace to 3 (the number of pixels of space (padding) between the image and the text).  The text you put in 'Title' will show as a tool-tip when you hover the mouse over the image.  Don't change anything in the Dimensions area as I haven't found my changes are applied.
8. Now you can click Insert.  You should see an entry similar to what's on the right.  If you click and drag the image, you can reposition it.
9. To adjust an images properties, click on the image then click on the button that looks like this .

Looking over what I just wrote, it doesn't appear to be a simple process, but believe me, it is much better than anything that existed a year ago.  A year from now this will all be much easier. 

Enjoy.