myLot FAQ series: How do I add an image to my friend's profile page?

This is part of the series of Frequently Asked Questions for myLot. For more information on this site, please refer to this article . So now, you have got some friends and you are all hyped up. You want to rock, you want to party, you want to scream your lungs out. This is all good! Then you browsed over to your friend's profile page and wanted to leave a nice picture for him or her. But wait, there are no options to insert an image like the case for when posting a new discussion or response (after you reach 500 posts). What do you do now? Well, it is not as difficult as you might imagine. Just 3 simple steps. ;-) Step 1: First, you need to get a picture. If it is already present on your local hard disk, then you can move on to Step 2. Otherwise, you need to first find the picture you want. You can do so via any of the search engines or by grabbing it from one of the many sites around that offer free pictures. And once you find the picture you like, download it (e.g. right-click then "Save as") and put it somewhere that you know the location for. My favorite place is the desktop. Step 2: Now you have a picture ready. The next thing you need to do is to upload it online. My current favorite is www.divshare.com but you can also use other alternatives such as http://imageshack.us or http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com .The point is just to upload the picture you have chosen, that is now on your hard disk, online. To guide you further, I will illustrate how to upload a picture using Divshare. Skip this if you can figure it out yourself (it's not that hard really :P). Type in www.divshare.com into the address bar of your browser and press "enter". You should see a page like this screen shot above. Now click "Browse" and a window like your "My Computer" will pop up. Locate the picture file you have found and double-left-click on it. Then you should see something like this. Remember to check the box indicating that you agree to the terms and conditions. I have not mentioned this but you do *not* need to sign up with Divshare to utilize this free upload service. Update: Unfortunately, this is no longer true. You need to register for a free account now. Then just go ahead and hit the "Upload" button and you should see the progress bar moving. When it reaches 100%, your upload is complete and you will see a screen like this. Now click on the "More options". A box with a few more links will appear. Zoom in on the "Full Size" row and highlight the entire link containing your file name. It is right after the "img src" tag. Once you have highlighted everything within the inverted commas, right-click to copy, or simply execute a copy command with control-c. This is the link we want. For this example, our picture location online is http://athena.divshare.com/s03/files/2007/05/18/673355/medal.jpg . Viola. Just to make sure you get the correct link, I want you to paste the link you have copied (using control-v) into the address bar of your browser. As you can see for this example, the link is working just fine and you should be able to see the picture you have uploaded (I have used my virtual medal in this example). Step 3: Alright, we are almost there. Now that we have the picture uploaded online, we need to play with some simple html code. The code I used for my own medal is: <a href="http://lordwarwizard.blogspot.com"><img src="http://apollo.divshare.com/apollo2/files/2007/04/11/374893/decree.gif" border=0></a> There are 3 portions to this code. Let's look at the center portion dealing with the "img src" tag. Basically, this notifies the browser that there is an image and supplies it too with the image source location. Earlier, we had our picture uploaded to http://athena.divshare.com/s03/files/2007/05/18/673355/medal.jpg . So replace the http://apollo.divshare.com/apollo2/files/2007/04/11/374893/decree.gif in the code with http://athena.divshare.com/s03/files/2007/05/18/673355/medal.jpg as the new image source. You can do that! ;-) The second portion is the "border=0" tag. I suggest you leave this as it is since for most cases, this provides the highest aesthetic appeal. The third and final portion is where the "a href" tag is. Notice that the current link is http://lordwarwizard.blogspot.com . This means that if someone clicks on the image I leave on the profile page, they will be directed to my blog. If you want your image to point somewhere too e.g. your own website, replace http://lordwarwizard.blogspot.com with your website address. Otherwise, remove the entire <a href="http://lordwarwizard.blogspot.com"> tag as well as the </a> tag at the end. So if you just want to leave a "plain" image, your tag should look like: <img src="http://athena.divshare.com/s03/files/2007/05/18/673355/medal.jpg" border=0> That's how simple it really is. So get cracking and find a suitable image to use. Have fun! ;-) PS.: There are of course other simpler ways you can get an image up there. Some websites such as www.mycommentcodes.com and www.bigoo.ws provide template pictures with ready html codes for you to paste immediately. You *can* do it this way but it will not convince your friends that you are too original or that you are sincere enough to cook up something yourself. So once again, the cliche stands - the choice is yours. ^^