When I set up a Live Space for my parents, I knew that eventually both of them would be using it. Although my family could probably tell who was writing just by the style of writing, I thought it would be nice to do something cool to give each their own personal voice to their blog postings. So I stole an idea from MSNBC.com’s blogs.
For each person who would be posting to the blog, in this case, my Mom and Dad, I created a little photo speech bubble which they could preface their blog posting like this:
I created the photo speech bubble using Paint .NET which is free alternative to Photoshop. Be sure to save your speech bubble in a format that is Live Spaces friendly. That’s GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP or TIF format only. (HINT: I matched the background of the speech bubble to the background of my blog post area so it would blend in seamlessly) Once the icon is created, upload it to your Live Spaces album. You can create a special album just for icons like this, or put it in the “My Blog Photos” album. Whichever you prefer.
Here we’re going to take a departure from the process I outlined in the earlier post about using Live Spaces albums and Live Writer to put photos in your blog postings because we don’t want that little bit of text below the photo like it shows in my vacation photo.
Since we don’t want to upload the picture multiple times each time we make a new post, we’ll just use the URL of where the icon is stored in the Live Spaces photo album. Using your browser, go to the Live Spaces photo album where the icon is located, and select it so it shows as such:
Right-click on the image and select “Copy this image URL”.
Now start Live Writer and your new blog post. Click “Insert Picture” then select the “From Web” tab. Paste the URL we copied from the step just above. The speech bubble icon should appear in the preview, then click “Insert" and the icon should now appear in Live Writer for your blog posting.
While not a completely elegant solution, it is a neat way to give a personal voice to individual blog postings if your Live Spaces blog is written by more than one person. If someone has an alternate way of doing something similar to this, I’d certainly like to hear!
