Publications page
This page is intended to contain a list of classmate publications. The model template at hrtemplate.org has one possible way to do this.
The html code to generate this format is more than a little tedious to generate by hand. To simplify the process we have written a program that takes much of the effort out of the process. More about that a bit later.
Amazon Associates
If you would like to join Amazon Associates, you can simply search for them on Google and follow the instructions on screen. It's a simple process and the main piece of information that you will need is the payee name for the bank account to receive any payments. Once you have an Amazon Associates account you are ready to proceed.
Download and prepare images
Amazon is the best source of images for your publications page. We suggest that you keep all the images in a single directory on your local computer (\hrxx\books, for example) and that you name the files with the author's last name plus a bit of the title. (This naming convention will make things much easier later on.)
To download an image, right click on it and choose "Save link as", or the equivalent in your browser.
Once you have downloaded some image files, you will probably have to process them. Amazon has taken to surrounding their images with white space. I find that it pays to bring the images into a photo-editing program and to cut out the white space. (If you don't alreay have something suitable you can download Google's Picassa3 for free. It's an excellent program that will certainly do the trick here.)
When you have all the images for a particular author you are ready to begin assembling the html.
Add the images to your site
- Open up the back end of your site and go to Joomla->Site->Media Manager. Then click on Stories and then Books. (If you don't have a Books folder, you can create one by entering the word "Books" in the top right of the page and clicking "Create Folder".)
- Click the "Browse" button and select the first of your books. Click "Start upload" to upload it.
- Repeat for the rest of your images.
HR Book Builder
You can download the HR Book Builder program from http://hrtemplate.org/hrbooks/. When you get to the page, select "HrTempBookBuilder.exe" and save the file to a convenient place on your computer. (When you execute the file, it may ask you to install Microsoft's .Net support, if you don't already have it.)
To use the program follow this general sequence:
- Click the "Choose directory" button and select the directory that contains your image files. (You only need to do this once.)
- Click the "Browse" button and select the image file for the first book for the author you are working on.
- Enter the author's name in the "Author" text box.
- If the author only has one book, select the "Single" radio button, otherwise select "Group"
- Click on the "Go to Amazon" link; Find the page for the book you want to display.
- If you are logged into Amazon, you should have a gray Amazon Associates bar at the top of your browser window. Click on the "Link to this page" button in the AA bar.
- Once the link page opens, select the "Text only" radio button, then click on "Highlight HTML".
- Type ctrl-C to copy the html text from the browser.
- Click in the "Link html" text block in HR Boook Builder and type ctrl-V to paste the html
- Click "Extract" to get the book's name out of the html. It will display in the book name field
- Click "Add book" to build the html for your site. The book title and image file name will appear to the right of the window.
- Repeat starting with the selection of the book image, for each additional book for the author you are working on.
- When you have added all the books for the author, click on the "Copy html" button and go to the publications page of your site in the back end, so you can edit it. Click the "Toggle editor" button to display the html. You paste the copied html between the previous and following authors, immediately after the code <div class="hrbrule"><hr width="200" /></div> (That code produces the rules between authors.)
- Press "Toggle Editor" again and then click "Save" at the top of the form. (Don't worry about the appearance in the editor: The editor does not honor the css styles that the html is based on. Your actual page should be ok.)
- Check the appearance of the page in your front end.
All of this sounds worse than it is. It actually is fairly easy. Contact Bill Bean 617-864-6813 or bill@spillthebeans.org, if you have any questions.
