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Arthur Frayn's Guide to Spiffier Posting for the Uninitiated
The man behind the big, giant, floating, stone head gives The Collective a few tips on posting at BIYF.com. Read on ...
As most of the members of the BIYF Collective know (or will know, once they send me the password they would like to have so they can log in), posting at BIYF.com is a very simple process. Once you log in, you'll see the welcome screen (Click to enlarge): 
You'll get your information on how to log in once you let me know what you'd like your password to be. The welcome screen lists out your options down the left side. There aren't many options and they're pretty well explained on the graphic above. Click on "Post a news article" to create a new posting and click "Modify a news article" to edit an existing posting. Either will take you to a screen that looks pretty much like this (Click to enlarge):
The "Subject" box is the title of the article, the "Title Text" box is the teaser text that appears on the home page along with the title, and the "News Body" box is the full body of the article that you get when you click "Full Story" on the home page next to the article.
Just type in your stuff and click "Submit" at the bottom of the page. Your article now appears on the home page of BIFY.com. When you click "Modify a news article" to edit an old posting, you just click through the lists to find your article. When you get to the edit screen, you'll notice a new checkbox with "Delete News Post?" next to it. Just check this box and click "Submit" if you want to completely delete the article you're currently editing. It's all pretty simple.
To change your password or account info, just click "Modify your details" in the left-hand list. You'll get a screen that looks like this (Click to enlarge):
I think this one's self-explanatory. Just be sure to click "Submit" when you're finished to save your changes. That's all there is to posting simple text articles.
Going Above and Beyond
If simple text articles are too boring for you, there is more you can do. The "Title Text" and "News Body" boxes mentioned above both support HTML that you can use to spice up your posts. Think that's too tough for you? Think again. Learn how to make things bold, slanty, and linked below.
HTML uses tags to send instructions to your web browser. Tags generally come in pairs and surround the text you want to affect like bookends. For example, if I wanted to make some text bold I might type:<b>This is my bold text.</b> and it would come out in your browser like:This is my bold text. The <b> and </b> tags tell the browser to start and stop being bold respectively.
Simple, huh? And you just learned two tags you can use.
For italics it's exactly the same except, wait for it, you use an "i" instead of a "b". Not exactly earth-shattering is it? Two more tags down.
The last ones for today will tell your browser when to start and stop making the enclosed text a link. It's exactly the same principle, but the start tag is going to look a lot longer because it has to tell your browser where the link is going. To make a link to Neferchichi's site as above, I might type:<a href="http://www.neferchichi.com/">Go to Neferchichi</a> and I would get this:Go to Neferchichi It works just like the other tags, just change the "http://www.neferchichi.com/" in the start tag to the full URL (address) of the location of your link. The text between the tags ("Go to Neferchichi") can be changed to whatever text you desire.
That's all for now. Stay tuned for Arthur Frayn's next installment for even more fun with HTML. If anyone's interested. Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?
Anyway, just let me know what you want for passwords so you too can delight and amaze the masses!
| April 15, 2004
by Zardoz |
