Can someone help a computer retard (me) through doing this properly?

[Garageless]

I haven't a clue how to attach a photo for a signature or even resize a damn photo for my avatar.

Can anyone lend me a hand?

Thanks.

-Mike

[dodgecharger-fan]

Hey! Another Canadian! Welcome.

I'll attack these one at a time:

Resizing a photo:
You need a program on your computer to do this.
Assuming you have a Windows PC, you might already have something like Microsoft Photo Editor.
Open up your picture with that and click on "Image" in the top menu and then on "Resize" in the drop down menu.
You'll see a box with Width and Height fields and few other things.
Most websites tell you how big a picture can be in terms of 'pixels".
So under "Units" click the arrow and select pixels from the drop down box.
Then change the width value to an appropriate size for the site you want to upload to.. Most likely something like 200 pixels.
The height value should change automatically because the "Allow distortion" checkbox is blank, right?
Click OK and you should have a smaller version of your picture.
Save it out to a new file name is you want to preserve the original picture.
You know have a smaller picture to upload.

[dodgecharger-fan]

for signatures:

The site needs to allow you to upload a picture while you're editing your signature.

This site does not, but you can still have a picture in your signature.
The trick is that the picture needs to be out on the internet somewhere.

I see you have the IMG and /IMG codes in your signature now.
That's the right way to go about it, except instead of a path to a file on your hard drive, you need to have a link to a picture file stored somewhere on the internet.

As an example, I have a picture stored in the webspace that I get as part of my Internet account.

To post a picture in a message or as part of my signature, I would copy the link into the message and put "[ img ]" and " [/img ] around the link.
(Note: I put spaces in there so the text would show up rather than the codes..)

To have this picture show up in a post:
http://home.cogeco.ca/~dhogan2/photogallery/photo14788/My%20Charger%20003.jpg

I would either type in "[ img ]"
then paste the link http://home.cogeco.ca/~dhogan2/photogallery/photo14788/My%20Charger%20003.jpg
then type in "[ /img ]"

OR this site has the neat feature of helping with this.

Click the http://www.garagejunkies.net/Style_1/editor/insertimage.gif icon and then paste the link in the pop up window and hit okay.

So doing all of that with the example file nets these results:
http://home.cogeco.ca/~dhogan2/photogallery/photo14788/My%20Charger%20003.jpg

[dodgecharger-fan]

For an avatar, this site makes it as easy as uploading the file from your computer. The only trick is getting the file down to the right size.
If you got through my first post, then this part should straightforward.

[dodgecharger-fan]

If you don't have a photo program on your computer, I would recommend irfanview. You can get it for free from www.irfanview.com.
The resize feature is nice because if you are working with very large files (from a digital camera for instance) it can "resample" the picture as well as resize it.
This is good because just resizing a big picture can cause the smaller version to be very grainy.

Here's a good example of what I mean. This was done before I discovered irfanview.

http://home.cogeco.ca/~dhogan2/images/Firewall%20&%20Under%20Dash0005.jpg

This is actually one of the better ones. I went back and fixed all the bad ones...

The process in irfanview is similar to the process I outlined above for MS photo Editor.

Open up the picture in irfanview.
Click "image" in the top menu.
Then "Resize/Resample"
Same type of settings as mentioned above.
Just make sure the "Resample (higher quality) button is checked.
You can play with the different sampling settings if you like, but the default seems to work well..

[Luckydevil]

For a sig pic I don't care if you just attach it in a post and then link to that in your sig. Even though it will not be a "xxx.jpg", it will still work with the img tags.