Making fancy posts

December 5, 2004 7:51 AM

I am looking for some Metafilter/HTML/Posting suggestions. I have seen some nicely done, complicated postings with hover-tags, acronym tags, imbedded items, etc. I have not found these suggestions/hints/suggestions - have I missed them?
Is there a spot someplace to test postings (/dev/null) posting page? So one could practice sophisticated postings without incurring the wrath of the Meta-masses by posting gibberish in order to test various methods. (HINT: yes Preview post is a start)
posted by fluffycreature to MetaFilter-Related at 7:51 AM (9 comments total)

By and large, complexity is not necessary. However, if you wish to add title attributes and acronym def markup to your post, I doubt you'd be out of line.

The method I suggest is as follows: compose the post using the text editor of your choice. Embed markup as you see fit. Save the file and open it in your browser to see how the markup looks.

Oh, and in case you didn't realize this, embedding things on the front page of MetaFilter is generally considered a bad thing.
posted by majick at 8:00 AM on December 5, 2004

i agree that practicing with a local file is a good idea, BUT remember that mefi automatically adds <br> to any hard line breaks. that means that when you're using your editor you shouldn't hit "return" unless you're ending a paragraph, even if that means that some words cross from one line to the next.

more simply - when you've finished, use preview anyway.
posted by andrew cooke at 8:10 AM on December 5, 2004

The only ones I know how to use are [small]to make small text[/small] and [a href="link.com" title="wizzle"]booger[/a] to make stuff appear when you put your cursor over a link. Note that the title tag renders differently on the blue than the brown.

Any more formatting than that and I think it looks annoying.

Note: in all the above, replace [ and ] with greater than and less than symbols respectively.

And I just use preview to see how things look.
posted by dobbs at 10:38 AM on December 5, 2004

You will want to take extra care with the "Preview" feature. Bear in mind that when you hit "preview," there is some code that will parse your comment and do some search-and-replace on certain things. Just try putting italics tags <i></i>around something, then hit preview. You will find that they've been changed to <em> tags. Presumably, this works better with the stylesheets, etc.

But one other area where we have trouble is if you want to use HTML special characters to represent a certain non-standard character, like the tag carats in my previous paragraph . If you enter the html escape code, then hit preview, you will find that your html escape code has been transformed into the character. Then, if you post, the character won't show up right, because it's not in html escape code!

The way around this is to re-type it AFTER hitting preview, in html escape code, and then hit POST directly. As far as I can tell, when you hit POST there is no parsing/mangling of your text, and whatever you type appears exactly as you typed it, including html escape characters.
posted by scarabic at 11:03 AM on December 5, 2004

And just because it's germaine:

Matt has recently expressed a lot of frustration with people using the IMG tag to embed images in their posts, and he threatened to disable that tag entirely. Please don't rush out and start embedding images like crazy, just because you can. It would be nice if we could keep that feature around.
posted by scarabic at 11:07 AM on December 5, 2004

fluffycreature, your user page could sevre as a scratch pad for html experiments. Several MeFi members have tinkered with their profile page's settings; you could practise your lorem ipsum there, if you like.
posted by Smart Dalek at 11:21 AM on December 5, 2004

It would be nice if we could keep that feature around for quonsar.
posted by Adam Greenfield at 7:25 PM on December 5, 2004

Just try putting italics tags around something, then hit preview. You will find that they've been changed to <em> tags. Presumably, this works better with the stylesheets, etc.

on what planet? i use italics tags in almost every post, and i've NEVER seen that happen.
posted by quonsar at 7:41 PM on December 5, 2004

Smart : Ah, yeah change my user page. Are people putting huge amounts of code into the "Blurb about You" section, because that is the only place I am seeing to enter anything of significance.

I have seen some marvelous user pages, customized to the hilt but am not seeing how. Nor have I experimented either...
posted by fluffycreature at 5:18 AM on December 6, 2004