Monday, April 28, 2008

Feature Focus: Adding Slideshows to your entry

I wrote on my blog in Feb how users can add slideshows from Bluestring.com and Photoshow.com to blog entries, including AOL Journals.     

As of now, AOL Journals allows you to use slideshows from many different places:

- The built in slideshows, including the "classic" style, and the "Woohoo" style slideshows.  Much has been commented on these before, but you can get to them when you click "Add Album". This is the most easy way to embed photos.

- Embed a slideshow.  Simply put, you go to another site to create a slideshow, then add that slideshow to your journal entry.  It requires "cut and pasting" of code to make work - something that you can get used to doing pretty quickly.

Slideshows that offer embed options:

Bluestring.com  allows you to create slideshows that contain Photos, Videos and Music.     If have not used Bluestringread the one page tutorial first.

Rockyou.com offers a bunch of slideshow options - here you can have simple ones that slide photos, to ones that add effects like snow flakes falling.

Photoshow.com offers both Video and Photo slideshows.  It has a very easy interface to create a slideshow, and then embed it into your journal.

Yourminis.com has two widgets - One for AOL Pictures and one for flickr, that allows you to view your photos from either site. It's a very simple slideshow, which makes it very powerful.

Slide.com, an early provider of slideshow widgets, is much like RockYou.com, offering some fancy styles for your photos.

Now the how...
With all of these slideshows that allow you to "embed", you need to first go to the site (such as bluestring.com),  create your slideshow, then embed the show into your entry.  This can be tricky at first, but you can easily get the hang of it after a few trys.  
All you need to do is 1) Copy the "Embed" code from the slideshow you have created and 2) In your entry, put the entry into HTML mode, then paste the code into the entry.  Be sure to flip the entry back to Text mode if you want to keep adding words to your entry.

I'll give some follow up examples of slideshows created in each service, so you can see.

--Will
http://www.willspeaking.com/


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for sharing all that useful information.

Rose

Anonymous said...

What happened to this past week's blogplug entry?

Anonymous said...

Wow...thanks so much.  This is very much appreciated!

Nancy

Anonymous said...

I'm with Nancy....I've been looking for sites and information and you nailed it. It's also good to see Magic Smoke returning to and continuing with making it easier for journalists

Anonymous said...

Also if you store your pictures in AOL pictures, you have the ability to create slid shows using the embed feature in the upper right toolbar...check it out

Chili

Anonymous said...

h