The image code would look like this:

<a href="http://chenzhen.wordpress.com/files/2007/06/godzilla.jpg" title="godzilla.jpg"><img align="right" src="http://chenzhen.wordpress.com/files/2007/06/godzilla.thumbnail.jpg" alt="godzilla.jpg" /></a>

Just plop it in there towards the top (I put it in after the first sentence) and you should be golden.

-CZ

I gave it a shot with the thumbnail image and definition tags on my own site here. I noticed that you aren’t using the dd, dl, dt, tags for your dictionary, but I think with the thumbnail image you can use the hspace and align attributes and make it look pretty darn slick having an image in selected entries. I posted the code in there so you can see exactly what I did (I didn’t use the “big” tag, but I’ll admit it would probably look a little better with them.

-CZ

Sorry to say, I know nothing about “the picture editor”, nor do I know the location of your trout pics! I haven’t looked into that side of things yet.

7. Chenzhen:

Maybe eventually I’ll experiment with adding a picture to an entry, to see how it looks. It must be placed in the exact perfect location. Once I (or someone) gets it right, we can create a template and post it for all to use.

The default picture location and size (or whatever) may not be to our liking.

As for the photos: they need to be kept really small, like in a real dictionary, and tiny photos are often only 8kb or something along those lines, or even smaller. Having, say, at some point in the future, 20 little 4kb or 8kb photos will not really slow the page down at all. It’s commonplace for blogs or news sites to have several large photos — 100kb or whatever — on the front page at any given time, along with ads and so on. The dictionary will load like a snap in comparison to most sites. So, yes, whoever takes on “Green Helmet Guy” and “islamic rage boy” can add photos to the definitions, if you know the technique for doing so. (I certainly don’t.) But for now, if whoever does it is unfamiliar with the photo uploading, just keep the definition to be text-only. Photos can always be added later.

And yes, folks, Thanos is correct: if you edit “offline” in a word-processing document, use a really basic program like “TextEdit” for a Mac or “NotePad” or whatever, that is “plaintext.” The hated Microsoft Word tends to insert crazy secret code to documents, and should be avoided.

The page load and pic thing wont’ affect too much if doesn’t grow too much, so either way is ok.

If everyone edits external, then that will work fine. Just a head’s up that I am used to working in WP, so I won’t be … I will put up a warning note when I am in editing, and delete it when done. (Just from long experience, external word processors + WP == TROUBLE unless you edit completely in plain text — WP has text pre and post processing for xhtml code built in.)

On photos if it’s all on one page, I would recoomend as few as possible but honestly was just trying to think about how you could define “Islamic Rage Boy” or “Green Helmet Guy” without an actual photo.

Yes, I have just updated the post to say it was by Thanos.

1. Thanos:

Here are my thoughts on each of your points:

1. Sorry to say this, but I’ve also updated your “point #1″ in the post to give my feelings about the “multi-page dictionary” concept. In short: I don’t like it too much. As I mentioned in one of the blog’s first posts, keeping the dictionary one single page is the main priority for me. Perhaps in the distant future, when it gets too big to be on a single page, we can redesign it, but for now and for the foreseeable future, it is nowhere near being too big to fit on a single page. And that includes having a few small illustrations, if that’s what people intend. Hell, the front page of any random blog contains several orders of magnitude more bytes than the dictionary does. Breaking it up onto several pages seriously degrades its usefulness to the reader, and introduces levels of unnecessary complication.

The dictionary needs to be optimized for the “user experience,” NOT for the “editor experience.” In truth, after a few weeks of a flurry of editing now, there won’t be much editing in the future: new words come along very rarely. Completely restructuring the dictionary just to possibly sidestep the highly-unlikely possibility that an editor will lose five minutes of work would be a big mistake.

The dictionary will be viewed by thousands of people as time goes by, and the vast majority of them (as I learn from the emails I get) simply read through the whole thing like a document, or like a list of FAQ questions-and-answers. It needs to be a one-stop-solution for all linguistic issues on LGF. Having it broken up would make it much less useful to our audience.

I’m not completely unreasonable, and would be open to hearing arguments for creating a multi-page dictionary, but so far I haven’t heard any substantive justifications.

2. As for adding photos, and if so, making them be a small file size: that is perfectly fine. But I think it’s an “advanced feature” that will only cause confusion at this stage, as many of the editors are still getting their toes wet with the whole WordPress blog system to begin with. Introducing a whole complicated new feature, at a time when some of the admins are still learning the rudiments of html and blog posting, may not be a good idea. Yes, eventually, we can add photos, but let’s hold off for a while on that.

3. The “categories” thing is fine too, but I get the feeling that most people won’t use it quite yet. Again, it’s overwhelming for new users. We’ll see how many people use the system. If people don’t use it, you can always go through each post and add category tags to them yourself.

4. I am one of those newbies! Learning computer code stuff really hurts my brain. I’m doing my best to upgrade my knowledge base, but I have a lot of sympathy for the non-tech-heads among us, which is why I want to keep everything as simplistic as possible for people.

New threads keep popping up here and I have no idea where they’re coming from. I’m pretty sure that this one was posted by Thanos. Hey Thanos.