Greetings, Cranky Users! I apologize for the false alarm yesterday evening. Cranky Users keep a diary sitting in the group queue, containing code for the Big Box o' Links™ that appears at the end of many of our group diaries, plus instructions for copying and pasting same to any diary being published in the group. To send it to the group queue, I have to put tags in it, so I don't have a way to prevent it from being published accidentally, other than titling it DO NOT PUBLISH and attaching the queue note DO NOT PUBLISH!!! Sadly, that was not enough to have it be, uh, not published. It's been deleted now. My thanks for the support of people who showed up to read that not-at-all compelling narrative.
The good news was, terra commented in that mystery diary with an interesting suggestion I had not known of before: there is a website called pastebin.com with the following mission:
Pastebin.com is a website where you can store text for a certain period of time. The website is mainly used by programmers to store pieces of source code or configuration information, but anyone is more than welcome to paste any type of text. The idea behind the site is to make it more convenient for people to share large amounts of text online.
It's free (as always, there's a "pro" account that costs under $25/year and offers no ads, much more space, etc.) and, if you are a programmer and use it to share code snippets, you'll be glad to know it offers syntax highlighting for a bazillion languages.
The FAQ gives more details. Our users being rather cranky, that's probably more complexity than I want to add to their diary-posting process, but it's a good resource for sharing other kinds of text.
3 am update: There's a new elfling diary just up as I write. We still don't have the big things we've been asking for , but there are some good smaller things, like permalink, and immediate assignment of the skull mojo icon to banned users. If you have not yet, check it out and see what you think.
Let's shimmy past the squiggle and see what else we can tell you, now that we have your kind attention.
Pasting links: I had a message exchange with Onomastic yesterday, where she was trying to give me the link for a diary but ended up with just the link for the front page. She wanted to send her message to more than one person, you see, and the creaky DK4 private messaging system doesn't allow that. So she sent her message to the first recipient and then copied it to her clipboard to paste into messages to subsequent recipients. The trouble was, when she sent the first message, the URL she had pasted no longer displayed in full, although the link still worked. When she copied, she only got the visible part.
For instance, there's a diary by Ojibwa from yesterday about ancient rock art. When I just paste the URL here, it looks like this: http://www.dailykos.com/... The link works, but if I were to copy this published diary passage to my clipboard, all I'd get of the link is the part of the URL that's visible; namely, the URL of the front page. If I pasted it somewhere, I'd have to then fix the link. Or, I could make the whole link visible by 1) enclosing it in [square brackets], and 2) pasting it TWO TIMES, separated by a space, inside the square brackets. The first time is the link's destination, and the second is the text that displays for the link. (Instead of repeating the URL, I could pick something else to be the text. I could say Ojibwa's diary. But if I want to show the full URL, maybe so as to copy and paste it, then I want to do this: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/14/966880/-Ancient-America:-Rock-Art-.)
Lists: If you saw the Cranky non-diary blaze through the DKos universe like a meteor last night and flame out, you saw the nice list in the top part about how to use the diary (hint: DO NOT PUBLISH it!) Some have asked about how to format such a list.
The list starts like this:
- Edit this diary.
- Copy everything in the second box ("Extended") to your clipboard.
But it could look like this:
- Edit this diary.
- Copy everything in the second box ("Extended") to your clipboard.
These two versions are almost identical to produce. The one with bullet points is called an
unordered list, and so its tags are <ul> - </ul>. The one with numbers is an
ordered list, tags <ol> - </ol>. Just as we put table rows and table data inside <table> tags, we're going to put
list items inside either kind of list tags, using list item tags <li> - </li>. So, for example, we can code
<ul><li>Slip out the back, Jack</li>
<li>Make a new plan, Stan</li></ul>
which will come out as
- Slip out the back, Jack
- Make a new plan, Stan
To change it to a numbered list, so we know when we get to 50 ways, all we need to do is change the letter u in both unordered-list tags to a letter o:
<ol><li>Slip out the back, Jack</li>
<li>Make a new plan, Stan</li></ol>
- Slip out the back, Jack
- Make a new plan, Stan
Or maybe this will be a more useful list to us:
Our Demands
As always, please use the comments to say what's not working for you on the site, ask questions, and perhaps use something you've learned to help someone else. Now, watch as I use the DO NOT PUBLISH diary correctly!
WHERE TO TURN: LINKS
☀ For more stuff sort of like this, the Cranky Users group.
☀ For lots of official detail about the site and its workings, the DK4 FAQ (frequently-asked questions). The main Daily Kos FAQ is still here.
☀ To report something not working to the dev team, the bug report form. A bug report will not be directly responded to, but will be kept on file by the development team until the issue is resolved or otherwise closed.
☀ To get immediate response for technical help or urgent site problems, the contact form (be sure to select the tech support radio button). A tech support request will get prompt response, but does not get added to the bug report database. If you use it to report a known bug, you'll be told it's a known bug, and that's it.
☀ For immediate catharsis, complain in a Cranky Users thread. These threads are regularly scanned by kos and developers, but it's not a guaranteed way to bring an issue to the attention of these folks. But sometimes you just need some sympathy from other cranky people! (And sometimes, other cranky people have advice that can help you.)
Our thanks to kos, the development team, and the Dkosopedia contributors for their vigorous efforts to deliver a site that works well and to help us know how to work it!
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