The Technical Side

Dan and I have had some problems with the technical side of setting up Issue 1. I create the newsletters in Publisher, which does not appear to be the perfect package for uploading things to the web in exactly the way I want.

The problem is that sometimes Publisher saves text and graphics together as a picture file. This means that it is very hard to upload a page that considers itself to be all graphics succesfully. Also, if you use certain types of text, the way it looks when you upload the page is not how it looks when you create it in Publisher. It is considerably stranger!

Unfortunately, I really like using Publisher to create the newsletter as it makes my life easy. I also can't think of another pacakge that I already own that would do as good a job. Therefore, Dan and I had to come up with some basic fixes for these problems.

Firstly, I removed all the pictures from text boxes and made sure the graphics and text were separate. Although this does have some bearing on the places in the newsletter that I can put pictures, it's not a big enough problem to really matter.

Secondly, I changed all the text so that it was of two or three standard types that wouldn't move around when uploaded to the web. Common text fonts that I can use include Arial and Comic Sans. Luckily, I quite like the look of both.

Hopefully there won't be too many more problems with uploading the newsletter now. If nothing else, I am learning a bit about how the web works, as well as how to use Dreamweaver and Core FTP Lite, packages that I previously would have been very scared of!