There are two steps to making an Image Link. First of all you need to have an image to make clickable:
1) Prepare the images you want to use in the comment area. Whatever place the Image Link takes your MySpace friends should relate to the image you pick for them to click. Things are less confusing that way. The image link we'll make here will use this image, , its name is "tacosoftwarelogo.gif".
On MySpace you may only use .jpg or .gif image files. The best size for them is like this or smaller. Smaller images are better because they load up faster. No one likes to wait for a web page to load. If it takes too long your friends will surf away. That's not a good thing to do to your friends! Ideal Images are:
Much bigger than 450 pixels wide the image may mess up the layout of your friend's profile page. Using images greater than web friendly 72ppi will make the page load very slowly or not at all if the computer is old or surfing via dial-up.
2) Name the images with web friendly names. No spaces, no special characters! Only Upper and lower case letters, numerals, - and _ are allowed! ALWAYS include the .jpg or .gif file extension at the end of the image's name, otherwise the browser won't know what to do.
beach.jpg me_beach.jpg MeBeach.gif are all good.
me beach.gif beach .jpg beach**.gif meBeach are all bad names.
Use this same scheme to name a folder for the images. "MySpace_pix" is the name I'll use for this tutorial's folder name
Simple names rule! They are quicker and easier to type without mistakes- any typo will make the picture not show up. Capitalization counts!
3) Connect to the internet (if you are not already) From your "Finder" menu, under "Go", one of the choices is "iDisk". Choose "My iDisk". After a moment or two your iDisk folder will pop open on the Desktop.
You will see a bunch of folders in there. Find the one called "Sites".
Drag the folder of prepared & named images into this "Sites" folder. It may take a few minutes for this file transfer to finish. Once the image files are in the "Sites" folder you can access them from the internet!
Eject your iDisk
4) Open up Safari or any other browser. In the address bar type this:
That is the beginning of the URL (address of where the picture lives on the internet) All the URLs for your images in the folder you made will start like that. After the last slash mark is where the image's name goes:
When you hit return, and the correct URL is typed in the address bar, your image should appear in the browser window.
How cool is that! Bookmark that page!
Set up a folder in your bookmarks to keep these links (URLs) of your images handy. It saves a lot of typing!
Part 2
1) First thing you do is download this free (donation-ware) groovy HTML Editor for OSX, Taco Html Editor and Install it.
2) Open Safari or your favorite browser. Surf to the page you want the image link to send your friends when they click it. Bookmark the page (if you haven't already)
3) In order to post a "clickable" image link on MySpace, you have to include some HTML code for it to show. This is where Taco comes in. Open Taco, under the "File" menu select "New".
Select all and delete all the text on the new page so it is totally blank:
4) From Taco's "Insert" menu choose "Link". This box will appear:
5) Where it says "Link Target" on top of this dialog box either copy and paste the URL from the browser page you want your friends to visit, or type it in. Caution! The link will be a DUD unless the typing is PERFECT! Broken links stink!
6) Next, where it says "Linked Content", select the "Image (URL)" button. In that space either copy and paste the URL from the browser page showing your image, or type in the URL of the image you want to make into a link.
7) Then hit the "Insert" button. On the blank Taco page you will get this:
8) Copy and paste that line of code exactly as you see it into the area on the MySpace page you want to make an image link.
To make this link open a new window (and not take over the MySpace window your message is being read from) here's a good trick.
After the first set of quotation marks "info-inbetween-them", make one space then type this: target="_blank" Be sure the > symbol comes right after (no space!):
9) Copy and paste all of this fancier code exactly as you see it into the area on the MySpace page. Any other text you want to type in with the image link goes before or after this code & must not break up this bit of code (between the < and >) at all!
10) You will see the image link and test its "clickability" when previewing your bulletin, comment, etc. before it is officially posted.
, its name is "tacosoftwarelogo.gif".
