Most of us who have been writing on PubWages for some time now use photographs and illustrations in the body of our pubs, and we know how to upload an image and embed it into the text. But did you know that you can also choose an image to put at the top of your page, where the PubWages logo usually goes?
How do we do that? Toward the bottom of the right sidebar, when you are editing your post, there is a slot for a featured image. You can decide to leave that blank, in which case the PubWages logo will appear at the top of the page. But if you click on “Select Featured Image” you can fill the slot with the image of your choice. Once you do that, you can actually see the featured image in the right sidebar.
In the screen snapshot embedded above, you can see that the featured image I am using for this post has been selected, and you can also see that if I wanted to, I could remove it by clicking on the blue underlined text that says “Remove featured image.”
How can we use the featured image capability to enhance our pubs? There are a number of different ways. In her pub reviewing the book Killing Horses, Foxtrotter9 used the featured image to include a photo relating to her pub at the very top of the page, rather than inserting it into the text below the logo. This is a very effective technique and it works well for her post.
Another way that you could use the featured image is if you want to have all the pubs written by you feature their own distinctive image, sort of like your own logo. I have tried doing this for a number of my own posts, using an image of the bookshelves in my dining room. Here is an example, and here is another example. Notice that in the first example, the featured image was related to the content of the article, but in the second example, about Bow’s hammock, the featured image was not related to the article, but it helped to form a sort of continuity between the different posts by the same author.
You can even make your own logo and post it up there for every pub you write. It is easy to make your own logo, because you can scribble, draw and print anything you want and turn it into a picture in MS Paint or any other software you use.
I know there are a lot of new writing sites out today that lure people with fancy graphic features that allow users to personalize their own space on that site. But we don’t need any fancy graphic features to personalize our own space on PubWages. We can just use the featured image option to good effect!
I haven’t verified this yet 100% but empirical data seems to suggest that if you have a featured image, it will automatically be oembedded whenever anyone shares the link on facebook or other sharing sites that support OEmbed. (OEmbed sucks an image from a post, turns it into a thumbnail and embeds it in your facebook stream. Links with an image are way more likely to be clicked.)
Thanks, Colleen. I’ve actually had varied experience with this. Sometimes it is true that Facebook will not even bother to show the featured image or any image at all in a pub with only a featured image. But at other times, the image is embedded in the post and looks kind of nice. And on Google+ these featured images even look quite big and robust when embedded.
Besides that, you don’t always have to allow it to choose the featured image. In Google+, if I want to, I can choose to embed one of the other images in an article with several images. Sometimes FB lets me choose, too, but FB is more erratic, and it’s not the same every time.
Very Cool – thank you for sharing this. I see we can even comment too:) Love it! I am for sure going to try it out!
Kelly, I’m looking forward to that! You can register under any name you like, but if it’s something I would not recognize, send me a message with your ID so I can approve you.
There have been so many spam bots lately that I have been deleting new users if I don’t know who they are.
This might be a fun new feature to try. I like the simplicity of WordPress and Pubwages, and some of the sites with the bells and whistles are not all that fun anyway.
Thanks, Sweetbearies. I think you will enjoy this feature, as you are an artist and create images in many types of media. It’s true: sometimes simplicity in a writing platform is a very good thing.