Zude Pages and the Future of Social Networks - Adding Stuff
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Here is the page I managed to put together at this point, after having uploaded an image, answered a few questions, and struggled to get my wallpaper in place (thanks to Astronomy Picture of the Day for the image):
This image has been cropped and reduced to fit the page. Not bad...but I had to struggle a lot more than Zude lets on to manage this. I couldn't even figure out how to get it directly from the web onto the Zude page; I had to save the image locally first, then upload it into their file manager. From the file manager, I got it onto the page by dragging and dropping while holding the CTL key.
When you want to drag and drop images onto a page in Zude, you need to do it with two separate windows set up. One should contain your Zude page, while the other contains the page from which you're trying to copy. This time, I succeeded in dragging and dropping an image onto my Zude page after only three tries.
Steve helpfully told me that I could right click the image to resize it, which I did; it's a little big in this screen shot. I could also move it around. But most of all, when I right-clicked on the image, I saw a list of shortcuts:
These in turn let me do various things with the image. Clicking on Edit Properties led me to an entirely different menu that allowed me to make the image more interactive; I could control what happened when someone clicked on the image, for example (such as have it take the person to a different web site).
Here I'd like to finally mention those buttons that appear across the top of most Zude pages; you see some of them in this picture. They're labeled Save, Pages, Objects, User, Tags, Rate, Review, and Tools. Pages lets you create, delete, and edit pages; Objects lets you add and manage things on your page; and all of them reveal menus that let you do some pretty cool stuff. Many things can be done by dragging and dropping. For example, I learned an interesting trick for multiple pages: by clicking on Pages and then clicking on My Pages, I got a list of my pages. If I then dragged and dropped one of those files onto the page that was open in my browser, I put a button on the current page that led to the page I'd just dragged.
In fact, dragging and dropping is how you do most things in Zude, along with right-clicking to get to the menus you need. Zude has a number of preformated objects (guest books, headlines, text blocks, etc.) that you can drag and drop onto a page to make it your own. I put together a second Zude page that features a short text block (three paragraphs), a video that I embedded into the page from Google Video, and a guest book. Now that I've had some more time to play with Zude, I've made some minor updates to my main page. Here's a screen shot:
On the top left is my own image, as you would find at many social networking sites. From this box I can access my messages and view my pages. Below it is my user profile, which I've set to be closed on initial viewing (it can be opened by anyone who's curious about it). The flower I found is tucked to the right, as is a button that takes the user to my second page when clicked. Above the lily is a header that takes me to Zude's tutorials when opened. Finally, near the top middle is a headline that says "Welcome to a tranquil part of the web." Any of these elements could be moved or deleted with just a click of the mouse. There is a lot more you can do with Zude; I've only had time to scratch the surface.
Next: Final Thoughts and Caveats >>
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