Creating your post - I recommend draft.blogger.com as your blog editing site. It has the latest and best features. The "classic" Blogger editing screen just does not work as well.
If you are copying text from your personal blog or other sources, to avoid formatting headaches for yourself and for me, please make liberal use of the "Remove formatting" button - the one with the capital "T" underlined and a red "x". Another way to do this is to copy the html code from the source and then paste it into the html editor of our site. You will likely to have do some new formatting, but it will be much easier.
Photos - You can upload photos for your post directly from your computer (preferred method - it makes the website faster) or you can add photos by using the photos URL from another website.
Photo sizes - I recommend that we use the Extra Large version of photos whenever possible.
Photo file names - If possible, include the name of the bird species in the file name of photos before you upload them. This makes the photos much more searchable by search engines and will help people looking up information about those species find our site.
Please use captions rather than centering text below the images. This will prevent formatting headaches and also makes the images more searchable.
Eliminate blank lines whenever possible. Because the template adds a dark grey border to all of our images, it is not necessary to place spaces before or after the photos or between photos. Sometimes blank lines are necessary for naturally dividing content, so it is okay to use them.
Bird Names - I prefer capitalization of proper bird names. For example, American Kestrel. If you are just talking about kestrels generally, you should use the lower case.
Preview your post. This way you know what it will look like before it actually posts live and you can tweak the formatting so that it looks good.
Posting Schedule - the posting schedule is maintained on this site. You can write your blog entry at any time and simply schedule it to publish on your assigned date. Please schedule your posts to publish at 4 am Mountain Time. We may have a second post each day around 3 or 4 pm.
If you accidentally publish your post on the wrong day, if you can, copy the html code for that post and then delete the post. You can then create a new post and paste your html content without losing all of your hard work and schedule it for the correct time. Or contact me. We may determine it is best to simply leave it published.
