These images automatically appear because CoolTea Conversations is “gravatar enabled” thus if you have a gravatar associated with your email address, voila – that image automatically appears with your posts and comments.

If you do not have a gravatar, then our system is set to use “identicons” which are geometric designs that are unique to your email address.

You can get a free gravatar here -> http://gravatar.com

Make sure you register your gravatar with an email address you plan to use when posting and commenting on gravatar enabled blogs like CoolTea Conversatiosn. And yes, your gravatar will also appear on other blogs when you post and comment provided those blogs are gravatar enabled.

This gets a bit into personal branding and I thoroughly recommend getting a gravatar if you have not already done so. And no, you don’t have to use a picture of you – can be any image – a favorite pet, cartoon, etc but it is gonna be small (e.g., 32×32 pixels or 16×16 pixels) so details get crunched.

The important thing is to pick an image that reflects you, your personality, taste, style, good sense, et al.

Short answer = easy

All you have to do is type two or three keys on your keyboard to represent the graphic smiley icon you want to appear when your blog post is displayed and voila – smiley of your choice appears in your post!

e.g., if you want a happy face to appear at end of a paragraph, then end your paragraph with a blank space and type a colon followed by a parentheses -> save -> voila -> … technically this face s/b ->

Smilies are fun to use but like many things – best used in moderation and akin to exclamation marks (e.g., too many over states) ….

So you ask, “Hey Chuck, how do I know what letters to type to get a cool face or any other smiley face in my posts?”

Great question – here is official site with letters and corresponding Smiley faces:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Smilies

Smileys are also known as emoticons and you can read more here ->

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon

ps – Automatically make your links clickable … just type in full url – e.g., h t t p bla bla bla … vs starting with w w w bla bla bla …

thus gotta have fully qualified url -> h t t p : / / -> in order for it to be hot linked automatically …

Originally I had uploaded it and glossed over the image align setting thus the image was right aligned by default which broke the entire theme as it pushed certain items off page and allowed other posts to run into each other – ugh!

After a bunch of debugging and further testing, we decided that since all CoolTea Pro Members have write access (e.g., create your own posts) – all of whom with varying degrees of computer literacy, we felt it best to remove the file upload feature with CoolTea Conversations posts.

Splish Splash

Now I can appreciate why Twitter limits their posts to 140 characters and text only – keeps it fast and simple – aka conversation friendly

I should also point out the various social media icons that accompany each post hence making it easy for you (and others) to share CoolTea Conversations on various social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, plus …

But the real point about this post is how easy it is to embed your favorite videos into your posts by merely cutting and pasting a url …

For instance, even though you see the Youtube video above, CoolTea Conversations is leveraging the oEmbed Standard that makes it easy to add a video right in your post by just typing:

h t t p : / / w w w dot youtube.com/watch?v=HfGytXRpfho

Just removed the blank spaces in my example and voila – a full Youtube url to the Wintley Phipps video – and the video player and video are automatically embedded into your post!

Pretty cool, eh … or is it amazing … …

Technically we created this site to be a virtual water cooler and fun area for CoolTea Members to blog about:

• Arts and Entertainment
• Books
• Civics and Governance
• Current Events
• Creativity and Innovation
• Education
• Entrepreneurship
• Family
• Fashion
• Food
• Health-Body-Mind-Spirit
• History
• Inspiration
• Intellectual Property and Law
• Just for Fun
• Kudos
• Multimedia and Web Technology
• Music
• Nature
• New Business
• Open Source
• Pet Peeves
• Pets
• Science
• Self Development
• Sports
• Strategy
• Sustainability
• Travel
• Video and Film
• Viewpoint
• and last but not least – zz-Other

We hope you enjoy CoolTea Conversations and to be continued …