Here are some helpful hints for successful blogging on JewishBoston.com.

Use short paragraphs. It’s hard to read large blocks of text on the screen. Help your readers by also keeping posts to 200-500 words.

Recycle great material. Reuse articles from your newsletters, meetings or sermons. (But don’t just post entire newsletters—remember the first tip!) Take pictures and videos at events and post them too!

It’s all in the timing. Try to set a schedule for when you will post to the site. Remember, every Tuesday night we send out an e-mail to over 20,000 users, so plan accordingly.

Include at least one picture or video. Make your posts more visually stimulating and tell your stories in multiple ways. Have fun!

Great headlines matter. Think of the readers: would they want to click on this?

Tell the world you’ve posted! Link to Facebook, Twitter, your website and newsletters; don’t forget to mention the site in paper materials too! Link shorteners like j.mp and tinyurl.com will help clean up your links for sharing and publication.

Adding Pictures and Video to Blogs

Step One: Place your text cursor where you’d like the picture or video to appear in your post. Click on the Picture or Video Icon. (Add a picture looks like a tree. Add a video looks like a piece of film.)

Step Two (for Pictures): Click on “Browse” and find the file on your computer, then click “Upload.”

Step Three (for Pictures): A thumbnail of your image will appear with a box asking you which size to insert. “Large” is actual size; medium and thumbnail are smaller. It's generally best to upload at the large size and adjust the size (if necessary) in the next step. 

Step Four (for Pictures):

Click on "Appearance" to tweak the size of your image or add a border. Click "Insert" when you’re done.

Appearance tips: make sure "constrain proportions" is checked or you’ll stretch your pictures. If you try to increase the size of a picture, the quality will get fuzzy, but it always works fine to make a picture smaller.

Step Two (for Videos):

Paste the URL of the YouTube page into the File/URL field.

Step Three (for Videos):

Click on “Insert” and you’re done! The video may show up as a yellow box in your blog editor, but it should display correctly in the final post. Sometimes after you hit "publish" the first time, your blog post will have an empty space where the video should be. Don't fret - just reload the page and your video should be there.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions.