ACHTUNG: How To Avoid And Fix Formating Problems

it is my hope that all contributors read this, for I believe will solve many problems that we have been having with posting.


THE PROBLEM: weird formatting issued with posts, generating alot of blank lines in the summery, and rendering much of the content invisible.

THE REASON: it all has to do with the "read more" code. apparently when you enter a post in the "compose" tab it goes all kaflooey with the extra html I added. when I added the html the instructions clearly stated that posts should be entered in the "edit html" tab of the posting box, not the "compose" tab. I set the "edit html" tab to default, which at the time I thought was making it default for all users. this was apparently not the case.

SOLUTION: I believe I have fixed it, but I want you to go to "settings", and in the "basic" tab, under "global settings" check and make sure the "Show Compose Mode for all your blogs?" is set to "no". if it is not, then set it to "no" and inform me that you had to do that.

HOW TO FIX POSTS AFTER THE FACT: if your post has gone kaflooey, or if you spot a kaflooey post someone else made, here's how to fix it:
1 - click the edit link for the post
2 - click the "edit html" tab
3 - get your hands dirty editing the html. this is way easy, but kind of tedious. there should be one [span class="fullpost"] bound by angle brackets instead of regular brackets (the regular brackets shown here for easy posting) after the post intro, and one [/span] (also with angle brackets instead of regular brackets) at the very end. delete all other instances of [span class="fullpost"] and [/span] for they are superfluous and are the root cause of the kaflooeyness.
4 - click "publish post" and you're done.

and finally,
A SUPER QUICK GUIDE TO VERY BASIC HTML: do not fear the html. it is way easier than you think it is. here is some very basic html that you may even be familiar with, even if you don't know it yet. this will come in handy here and on many other internet sites:

the basic syntax of html is as follows - a right angle bracket and a left angle bracket enclose "tags". each tag opens with the tag itself bound by two angle brackets, and then more or less the same tag bound the same way, but preceded by a "/". many of you may know the more basic tags as BBCode on forums, where instead of angle brackets, regular brackets are used. for example, to bold text on a forum you would type [b]then type the text to be emboldened here[/b]. now if I keep the b's and the backslash but change the brackets to angle brackets I am an emboldening terrorist!

do the same with...
i for italics
u for underline
strike for strikethrough
blockquote for

block quotations

so you see, it all makes a kind of sense at the beginning. but don't worry, the more advanced stuff makes less sense as you go along.

if you fuck up on these now and then, don't worry, they are easy to fix. just go back and spell check your tags. if you would like to know more html tags and tricks, there is a whole internet full of html tutorials and cheat sheets.