Posting Tips

Discussion Board Posting Tips

by Tom Meinen

For those who want to put bold, italic, underlining or other features into your posts, here are some HTML tags you can use to produce them. You put the "tag" used to insert a code inside a bracket . The < > and anything you put between them will not show up in your message You need to put the code at the start of the text you want affected, and then at the end of the text with a / in front of it. The / will turn off the effect.

Recommendation: Use our boards' preview option to check if your html has worked.

Here are examples of HTML commands:

Attributes

Bold: bold

Italic: italic

Underline: underline

Center:

<center>This text is centered</center>

strikethrough <strike>~~strikethrough~~</strike>

Blink: <blink>blink</blink> (I recommend using this command sparingly. It's annoying to people and it only shows up in Netscape. Internet Explorer and Opera users will not see it.)

Changing Font Sizes:

size 1 text

size 2 text

size 3 text (default size)

size 4 text

size 5 text

size 6 text

Changing Font Colors

The simplest way to change the color of your text is by using the name of the color with the following HTML command, as is shown in these examples:

red text

blue text

purple text

green text

brown text

The most accurate method to change your text's colors is to use hexadecimal color codes as is shown in these examples:

red text

blue text

hot pink text

dark blue text

To see which colors you can use with this method, check out the Hexadecimal Color Chart.

You can combine any HTML tags together, like this.

Posting with Moods:

You can post with different moods that look like this:

For details on how to do it, click here.

Putting standard links in posts:

First method:
1.Click on "Post Message."
2. Fill out the same fields you normally do.
3. In the field that says "URL" put in the URL you want (e.g. http://home.earthlink.net/~tmeinen/cyberfive/).
4. In the field that says "URL Title" put the title (e.g. CyberFive).
5. Finish making the post as always.
With the above method, you can only put in one link per post.

Alternate method:
Where you normally type text, use the HTML commands, per the sample below, inserting the URL and Title you want.
<a href="http:/www.vegsource.com/">VegSource</a>
With this method you may include as many links in a post as you want.

Putting e-mail links in posts:

If you want people to be able to just click on your e-mail address in a post in order to write to you, there are two ways you could do it.

First method:
1.Click on "Post Message."
2. Fill out the same fields you normally do.
3. In the field that says "URL" type in the word "mailto" as one word in lowercase, then a colon, then type your e-mail address. Example: mailto:sampleaddress@myemail.com
4. In the field that says "URL Title" type your e-mail address again (or whatever words you want, e.g., "e-mail me.")
5. Finish making the post as always.
With the above method, you can only put in one e-mail link per post.

Alternate method:
Where you normally type test, use the HTML commands per the sample below:
<a href="mailto:sampleaddress@myemail.com">sampleaddress@myemail.com</a>
With this method you may put as many e-mail links as you want in a post.

Putting images in posts:

Here's how to put up a picture in a post. First, the photo you want to show needs to be on the Internet somewhere. (Holding the picture up to the screen won't work.) For example, there's a photo of the Nelson kids at this location:
http://www.vegsource.com/112/dancers_lg.jpg

Here's how to put it in your post --

First method:
1.Click on "Post Message."
2. Fill out the same fields you normally do.
3. In the field that says "Optional Image URL" put in the link to the image. For example, if I were to post the picture of the Nelson kids, I would put in this link: http://www.vegsource.com/112/dancers_lg.jpg
4. Finish making the post as always.
With the above method, you can only put in one image per post.

Alternate method
Where you normally type your message, use the following HTML commands, inserting the link you want to use. (The sample shows the link to my niece and nephew.)

<IMG SRC="http://www.vegsource.com/112/dancers_lg.jpg">

With this method you can post as many images as you want, but the more kilobytes you link to, the slower your post will load. In general, it's not a good idea to link to more than 80 kilobytes.

If you want to put up your own photos, you'll need to upload them to the web somewhere so you can link to them like this. You can get free websites from various services around the internet -- just ask someone on the discussion boards. If you don't have your photos as a jpg or gif file, you could take a photo to Kinkos and have it scanned into a file, then upload it to the web so you can link to it.

Finding Image Links

"What if I find an image somewhere on the Internet and want to post it?"
It's easy. You just need to know the image's URL. Here's an example of how find out. On our main page, at the very top, you'll see an image of our logo.

With Netscape Navigator 4.04 or higher for Windows
1. Move the cursor over the image of the kids, then right click with the mouse.
2. A menu pops up. Scroll down and choose the command, "View Image."
3. The image alone is shown. There's a field at the top of the screen that says "location." It tells you that this image is at this URL:
http://www.vegsource.com/common/logo.gif

With Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher for Windows
1. Move the cursor over the image.
2. Right click, then choose "properties" from the pop up menu.
3. Another menu pops up. Look for the word "address." The URL is listed there.

Mac users
I'm afraid I don't know how to do this on a Mac. This is not intended as a slight. I simply don't have one of those machines, so I can't provide instructions.

Special Note: Some web sites have a policy against linking to their images, especially providers of free graphics. It's up to you to determine a site's policy before posting an image here. Some sites actively block hot linking to their graphics. If this is the case, you will not be able to link to them.

Putting Sounds in your Posts

Important Note: Sound files can be extremely large. A rule of thumb: If a file is larger than 80 kilobytes, you should let people know its size in advance so that they can choose if they want to wait for it to load or not. For playing songs, MID files are usually the smallest. You can do a search for sounds on various search engines, just add .mid in the search parameters for the name of the song. Then you can link to that sound in your post.

You can make a sound start playing automatically with the sound box hidden and repeat over and over if you want. Since you're not giving the person a choice as to whether it plays, you should only use this method for relatively small files (rule of thumb: under 80 kilobytes). You need two commands, one for Netscape users and another for Internet Explorer users. We're not talking about whether you use Netscape or Explorer. We're talking about the end user. In other words, to make sure both Netscape and Explorer users can hear your sounds, you'll put both these commands in your post.

Here's an example of the commands you should include if you were trying to make the Psycho Theme play in your post. That midi file is located at: http://www.vegsource.com/psych.mid

You would put the following 4 lines into your post:

<bgsound src="http://www.vegsource.com/psych.mid" loop="infinite">


<embed src="http://www.vegsource.com/psych.mid" hidden="true" autostart="true" loop="true">

Note: Always put the Internet Explorer command first. If you don't, some versions of Netscape will get confused and not play the sound. Also: The "" and "" are optional. These are only labels to help you remember which is which.