- Quick Stories & Pictures How-To
Guide -
What am I supposed to say ?
Tell your story however you want.
How you are doing now. How you got to where you are
now. Troubles in diagnosis, medication, family understanding,
whatever really hit you. Check out some of the other stories &
pictures to get an idea what others have said or photos they've shared.
What document format do I use to write my story?
The best thing is to keep the
document and format simple. Concentrate
on the message. Plain old text messages are the safest for
translation, with just periods, paragraphs, and such. The
kind of thing you'd do in Windows Notepad. MS Wordpad or Word
are ok. WordPerfect probably is ok, too. Using an
HTML editor will give you more control over what your story
could really look like, as long as you don't go berzerk with
declared fonts, tables, and the like. In any case, forget
fancy fonts and formatting features, we'd probably wipe them out in
putting them on a web-page, anyways. Grammar and Spell checking are
nice, but we'll try to fix that up, too.
How do I add pictures ?
Pictures are a
whole nother thing. If you only have hardcopy photos, they
first have to be scanned into a digital format file. That will
usually be in a file with a jpg or .tif format. ( Digital Camera
pictures are usually already in .jpg format ) After you figure
out how to get them into your computer (which is outside the realm of
this document), you should put them in a place where you can find them
again, like the My Pictures folder.
How do I save the Story and the Pictures?
The
best approach is to write
your story in some editor like Notepad. Save it where you can find it
again. My Documents folder would be one typical place. The
pictures you should save from the camera, or wherever the camera saves
them on the computer, into the My Pictures folder.
How do I send the Story and Picture ?
Then you open up your E-Mail program, like Outlook, Thunderbird, Opera, or whatever. You can either cut-and-paste the Story into the body of the message (in which case you can see it's there) or you can attach
the file to your E-Mail. Pictures are similarly attached.
(Do note in the body of the e-mail what or who is in the
pictures. If you want somebody rubbed out, mention it here.
All
E-Mail programs have a way to Attach other files. Just have to
look at the menus, or check the program's help file.
The Long Version . . . .
- Who Are You?
- Most important is to let us know what name you are best
known by to other visitors of this site.
- What's your story?
- There's the obvious set of facts people will want to
know.
Do you have MS? What type? How long? Or do you act
as a
caregiver? Then the personal
side. We have some Story
Suggestions below.
- What do you look like?
- It's always nice to have a picture to hang a story
on. We
have a separate Photo Guide
below, on how to do this.
-
- How do I submit my story and picture?
- Submission is as easy as sending us an e-mail with your
name,
story, and attached picture. If you want to help us out, or
get fancy, we
have some E-Mailing
guidelines for that, too.
The general format of the Stories and Pictures page is name
and picture to the left side. On the right is a
brief introduction. So a few well chosen sentences for an
introductory paragraph are a good idea. Then we'll link to a
more detailed page with a bigger picture and more of your
story. We won't edit your story for language, grammar, or
spelling. (We'll be following up shortly with more
information on how to do a fancy formatted detail page with a bigger
photo and longer story.)
Typically, all you have to do
is submit a file in "JPG" or "JPEG" format (most digital cameras
support this). If you scanned a picture, and have it in a
"TIF" file format instead, we'll see what we can do -> it's
probably ok. In the unlikely circumstance that you have a
file in some manufacturer's proprietary format, no guarantees we can
convert it. What we do
is create a shrunken thumbnail photo 96 pixels high for the main
Stories and Pictures page, and shrink your picture as necessary so it
will load quickly on the detail page. (We won't crop, change
colors, or any other fancy stuff.)
If you want....you
can prepare the thumbnail 96 * n pixels. You can pre-shrink
the detailed photo down to a 300 * 400 pixel or smaller
image.
Mail your submission to: SandP@PeopleWithMS.com
Subject: Stories and Pictures - YourName
Your Story: Please try to send us plain old text
files. The fancy documents such as from MS Word embed lots of
formatting that doesn't work well on web pages.
Your Picture: Should be an attachment, not embedded
in the body of your e-mail. If you are sending both picture
and thumbnail, for the thumbnail use a "t" at the end of the filename
("filenamet.jpg").
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2003 PeopleWithMS.com