Editing your work

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I'm sure that Sprig and Fell have stuff to add here, but now that I've been touching up and editing a articles for a while, here's some things I'd like to see contributers doing. I don't want anyone to take ANY of this personally, most people (including myself and Fell) have made these same mistakes with contributions.

- The articles use normal HTML.  This means angle brackets (<>) around their tags. Not square brackets ([]). Note that this is opposite the message board convention, which uses square brackets so mistyped HTML can't screw up the entire thread.

- Since the articles use HTML, you HAVE to at least put a <P> tag at the beginning of each paragraph for submitted articles, or else it looks like one big paragraph, and the editors have to decipher where the paragraphs begin or end, which isn't always easy. Technically, you never have to close a <P> tag, and if you dont' like or know HTML, you don't have to do ANY other tags.

- It's versus its. Just be careful with this one. "It's" is a contraction of "it is" while "its" is a possessive pronoun.

- Content: we love non-review articles. they make for interesting and unique content that can't be gotten anywhere else. Just make sure that your article has direction and focus, and above all, makes the reader care about your subject.

- Double check your links, that they work, and open in a new browser window as appropriate. (this one I bring up because uh... Fell, I forgot to put the "target='_blank'" attribute in all my link tags on Staff Picks 4, so uh... sorry)

There's more to come, I'm sure. But I want to remind you that I don't mean to step on toes or bust chops with this. I'm just pointing out things we can all do to make the editor's job more easy and improve teh quality control over all on the site. Thanks.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

ok, I can do that.

[Lieutenant Kije]

Oui.  I didn't know that about the <p> tags.

[Spriggan]

once more people when submitting articles if you add HTML, make sure to use the correct tags.  The forum is not HTML so [p], and anythink else with [] will not work!  We just got several articels that used this.

Also Jeffe <pre> dosen't work with our system, it formats realy funky so just use <P> from now on.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

hmm didn't know that (pre) wouldn't work, it was on the tags link on the submissions page and it looked easier than doing a hundred (p)(/p) tags
I'll resubmit tomorrow.

[Spriggan]

Don't worry about it, I changed it allready. And the PRE tags are kinda funky, they never realy worked the way they where intended.  For one thing when you use the <PRE> tags it stops line wrap.  So while if you had a bunch of short lines/words (like a grocery list) you wanted to format that way it would work perfectly.  Also when you copy and paste text and add <PRE> tags theycould end up messed up as well.

[Lieutenant Kije]

My fluency in HTML is equivalent to that of a first-year high school student in Spanish.  In other words, I know how to say "hola" and "donde está el baño."

So I know the bold and italics tags are the same, but are the other forum tags (size for example) the same also?  (Of course, when I say the same I recognize that the forum uses [] whilst HTML is <>.)

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

mostly no. In a few cases, yes.

[Mistress of Darkness]

to link to another page: <a href="YOUR URL HERE" target="_blank">DESCRIPTION OF URL HERE</a>

the target equals blank means that it will open the link in a new window

to display a picture <img src="URL LOCATION OF PICTURE HERE">

to create headings you can use <h1> <h2> or <h3> which will create headings of different sizes.

I hope that helps with some of the basics. Saint and Sprig are good sources for any questions that you may have.

[Spriggan]

Just like to note, mainly for SE since he probaly dosne't know this, that if you want to put clock icons in a review somewere besides the main score (like in JP's eva artciles) you just type ###score=X###  with X being a number between 0 and 12, basicaly multiply the score by two to get X.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

oh, wait, I'd seen that code. I totally flaked on doing it. Thanks.

[Spriggan]

here's a thought, can who ever's posting an article approve it as mod only first then view it to make sure that the HTML is correct before makeing it live?  I shouldn't have to keep on reminding people about things like this, but it is kinda annoying to have to keep on fixing the html code of articles.  And since I don't read all the articles posted there are probaly several that a still formatted wrong.

[JP Dogberry]

Ah, this is the thread with the clock code. I was going to add that to my recent article, but gave up after I couldn't find the thread with it after ten minutes of searching.

I'm kinda slow.

[Spriggan]

na, this has nothing to do with the clocks, just plain old fashioned HTML.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

you don't have to approve something as mod before you look at it, jsut submit it. I check it out when I do it, usually. But there are lots of people who submit who aren't mods, and therefore won't know where the article is. that's just one of the perils of being a mod/admin. You have to fix code