how to post a picture with words, step 1
Okay, today's experiment is going to be an effort to post pictures with texts in between. I have beside me the tutorial from The Real Blogger Status, a copy of my original HTML template, and the template that is up on my blog at the moment. (Printed these twice after running out of paper, mixing the templates together, and deciding that life is too short to sort them out. Sorry, redwood tree that I scarificed to the paper companies.)
First up, the picture.
It's from Pyschobunny's blog. But I saved the picture to My Documents first. The point here is not to link back to someone else's blog or post: that takes bandwidth (which is how images are stored, and there's only a finite amount) and money (I'm fuzzy on this concept but perhaps someone can explain this in a comment?)
What we have so far: the image embedded in a post. I'll publish this version, then save it again with only the image, and that version gets saved only as a Draft.
Comments
When an image is available online for people to see, "online" or "on the internet" means that it's been stored a webserver somewhere. Server = just another computer. Images have a file size. Larger image, larger file size. Your skull bag picture has a file size of 28 kilobytes, which is to say that it takes up that much space on your computer, or that much space on the server since it's online. There are a few ways to find that number, but it's not really relevant to anything you'd be doing. The important part is that it has a size. (A size which I will pretend is 30k rather than 28k. No point in making the arithmetic hard.)
Bandwidth is, in this sense of the word, how much stuff gets sent out. You have your 30 kilobyte image sitting out there. If exactly one person views it online one time, then it's been sent out once and 30 kilobytes of bandwidth have been used up. If 10 people each want to see it one time, it's been sent out ten times, and 30 * 10 = 300 kilobytes of bandwidth have been used up. 30 kilobytes is sort of a small image and it's unlikely that as few as ten people would see an image, so things add up quickly.
Where money comes into play is that people are often allowed only a finite amount of bandwidth usage per month before 1) they have to start paying money (or more money), or 2) they lose access to their account for the rest of the day or month. Think cell phone minutes. If you hotlink, you're using up someone else's alloted bandwidth and thus potentially costing them money.
And by saving the image and then posting it on my blog - instead of hotlinking back to the source - then the bandwidth hit, so to speak, goes against my account instead of the blog where I found the image, right?
How'd you figure out how much bandwidth you have varies by where your photos are online. Generally speaking, if there's a limit, it'll be mentioned in the terms of service or possibly some place like a FAQ page. That said, if you're not paying for anything related to your blog, it's not something to bother worrying about.