Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Adding Images to Your MySpace Profile

MySpace is the most popular social networking site in the world. According to Quantcast and Neilson Online, the site has over 50 million unique visitors a month. As far as actual user accounts, it’s hard to tell how many there actually are as News Corporation, MySpace’s parent company, does not release that type of information. However, it’s generally accepted that there are well over 100 million user accounts by now.


One of the favorite things for people to do is post images on their MySpace site. Unfortunately, like many things on MySpace, this is not always easy to figure out. In order to help eliminate some of that pain, this article will take a look at how to go about posting images and pictures on a personal MySpace page. (I am assuming that the reader already knows how to edit his/her profile.)


The Basics


MySpace is not always clear on what it does and doesn’t allow, e.g.: “Adding color, graphics, and sound to your profile page is fun and easy and requires only a basic knowledge of HTML or CSS.” In our case, that would mean that you just upload an image to a directory and create a link to it. However, MySpace doesn’t allow the direct uploading of images, except in the pictures section. That doesn’t do much good if you want to display an image on your front page or in your blog. But there are ways of linking to other images. It just all depends on where they are on the Web. That’s what we’ll be focusing on here.


General Linking Instructions


Since you can’t directly upload the image (except as mentioned above), that means the image must already reside on a server somewhere on the Web. That can be on an existing Web site that you already have outside of MySpace, or on one of the image hosting Web sites. (Be sure you don’t link to other sites without the express permission of the site owner. Otherwise, you are stealing their bandwidth.)


So let’s say you have an existing Web site located at http://www.someplace.com/, and you want to display your logo over on your MySpace site. First, determine what the direct link to the image is:

http://www.someplace.com/img/logo.gif

Now, login to your MySpace account and click on the [Edit Profile] link. You need to decide where on the page you want to place the image. You will be previewing the page before it goes live so don’t worry if you put it in the wrong place. You can always make changes, even after it goes live. Once you have figured out where you want it, create a link back to the image on your personal site:

<img src=”http://www.someplace.com/img/logo.gif”>

That’s it. Just plain, simple HTML code. It’s important to remember that, whatever the original size of the image is, that is the size it will be displayed on your MySpace site. You can adjust the size in the img tag but it’s best to allow the browser to determine the size, using the original graphic. One method is to create a special directory on your own site to hold images for linking from your MySpace page. That way you can determine what the size is you want, without changing anything that is also being used on your own site.


Linking to Image Hosting Sites


These sites are created for the express purpose of hosting images. They can be used for posting images that you don’t want on your own Web site, or, as in our case, you can link to them from other sites. There are a number of these image hosting sites, including the more popular ones such as Photobucket and Flickr. You will need to set-up an account to use these services but for most of them there is no charge.


Photobucket


Once your account is set-up and you have uploaded some images, find the image you want to use on your MySpace page. Underneath the picture you will see a series of links. Find the one that says “HTML Code – Websites & Blogs.” This is the code you want to use. It will look something like the link below (all on one line):

<a href=”http://photobucket.com” target=”_blank”>
<img src=”http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm108/LandscapeTubes/Islands/Deck.png” border=”0″ alt=”Deck”>
</a>

If you look closely, you will see that the code includes a link, along with the graphic. If you only want the graphic, just extract that section:

<img src=”http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm108/LandscapeTubes/Islands/Deck.png” border=”0″ alt=”Deck”>

In the [Edit Profile] portion of your MySpace account, place the link in the section on the page where you want it displayed.

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