Making Picture-Links in Blogspot

So, in a couple of my classes, we are maintaining academic blogs on digital literacy and its ties to Moby Dick and John Milton (Paradise Lost). As lots of people are posting pictures, I wanted to do a quick post for anyone interested in making blogspot pictures link to external websites. , it's pretty basic:

1. Click on the [Insert Image] button

2. Choose the picture from the available options (Upload, From a URL, etc.)
3. Select the picture when it comes up in the window, and click on the blue [Add selected] button on the bottom of the window.
4. Position the image wherever you want, then click the HTML button on the left. This basically  brings up the code that makes your blog work.

5. Use the find option (CTRL + F in Windows, CMD + F for Mac) or scroll through the text to find "a href." An example from this document looks like this:

6. Check to make sure that this is the right picture (the filename is the last thing in the quotation marks), and change the entire web address (the content in the quote marks) to whatever website you want to link to. You'll end up with something like this:

7. Hit [Compose] to go back to the regular blogger editor, and you're done! That's it! Now, if you haven't been clicking on the pictures all along and you have made it this far, you might as well enjoy a few Google easter eggs by doing so now...

Happy blogging!

"pity these hands," à la e.e. cummings

pity these hands,

gnarled and crippled

that never ached

to bring another aid,

that never sweated

in the cupped palms of a lover

and grew wrinkled, old,

alone.

pity that heart,

battered and befuddled,

deprived of love

by love once lost,

that never knew mankind

nor humanity–

that heart

that ticked and tocked

for want of other occupation

and then, gears grown thirsty

and beset by rust,

one day

stopped.

"A Bunch of Phonies"

I read The Great Gatsby this week, and that's got me thinking a lot about the ideals that we construct for ourselves. See, Jay Gatsby isn't really Gatsby at all. His name is James Gatz, and Gatsby is just his constructed persona-- the summation of all of his 17-year-old aspirations of money, influence, sophistication, and charm. The thing is, everything that he lives for-- everything that he is or represents-- is an empty shell, an arbitrary abstraction of what he is to become. He spends the entire story trying to convince himself that he has, indeed, attained that unattainable dream, reached that great summit that he had so long before imagined, but in the end, the dream falls apart; the reality of his situation is brought to light, and he is left all alone.

I've asked myself often, 'For what and/or whom do you live?' and I find myself answering differently each time. I guess you could say that at one point in my life, I had my own Jay Gatsby that I had built up for myself: he was quick-witted and dagger-tongued, cynical yet a hopeless romantic, a perfect intellectual, an overt critic, a part-time philosopher, and an aspiring novelist. He wrote lots of first pages of books and told people that he was writing a novel. He knew all about Kant and Jung and Heidegger-- that, perhaps was one of his more real faces. He read every long book that he could get his hands on and made a point of informing everyone that he not only had read them but also thoroughly enjoyed each and considered it one of his favorites. And it's easy to sound smart when you know a little bit about something to which others are entirely ignorant. It's like the kid in your 9th grade class who is fluent in five languages because he knows how to say three sentences-- that is, until someone who speaks Portuguese shows up, and then he's only fluent in four languages.

I think I first saw myself one day in high school when my friend, Abigail, asked me for help on a homework assignment. I remember that she turned to me at one point and said, "Greg, don't take this the wrong way, but you can be really condescending at times. That's why we don't usually ask for your help." At first I was kind of taken aback, and the holographic image that was ever before my eyes lost focus for a moment; all I could see was a little kid who was kind of afraid and pretty lonesome, but then the stabilizer came back online with a string of self-justifications, and the image was back again.

I've changed a lot over the past six or seven years, and while I can't say that I'm free from hypocrisy or unkindness or pride, life has had its way of peeling back some of the dragon's scales. It's never much fun at first, but then the hologram comes down, and you start to see things in color again. Sometimes, you can distinguish a faint shimmer or a quiet whirr about others-- as if they have some little hologram generator as well--, and you think to yourself about what you once were and what you've become. And you're glad for who you are, and you feel, if only for an instant, that that little kid inside you has grown up a little bit. He's learned a lot, and he yet has a lot to learn before he becomes what he is truly meant to become... but he realizes above all that it's always better to be you, with all the flaws and weaknesses and sorrows, too...