Tips

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Feel free to start a new post below, to experiment with what works or doesn’t work in terms of editing features, and so on. You may leave your posts here, or delete them, or if you want to delete a post but can’t, leave another post below asking me to delete it.

I’ll leave up an example of my own scratch zone, including “PopeBeanie” in its title. It’s content might vary over time, since I’m a moderator and can edit my own posts for unlimited periods of time.

This also means I can edit any of your posts if you like, if you want me to help you figure out how to make a feature or something work. You can leave your posts up so other people can learn from them too, but that’s completely up to you.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

I now use this topic area for temporarily editing posts until they’re acceptable to be published. In fact THIS post that you’re reading is a work in progress.

The following tip will be too much trouble for some… maybe I’m the only poster here who needs to use it consistently… like practically every time I write any post! Here’s my new process:

Before you create a new post, you can create it by quoting from a specific post that you want to respond to:

1. Highlight the specific text in the post that you want to respond to.
2. The first time you click on the QUOTE button, the highlighted text is copied as a quote block to a new post for you.
   1. Unless you want to edit the quote itself, press Enter to go to the next line, then press the quote/unquote button above your post. (This button has one double quote symbol in it, i.e. “, which is NOT the same button as the QUOTE button used above).
   2. You should now be able to write underneath the quote block as usual
3. You can add more quote blocks from other posts if those other posts are on the same page:
   1. While still editing your new post, press Enter to start a new line
   2. Highlight the text from the post that you want to quote, and press that other post’s QUOTE button
   3. This will create a new quote block, just like it did the first time, but this time it’s just adding to your existing post instead of it creating a new post
   4. As you did in the first quote block, hit Enter to make a new line, then hit the “ button to get out of the quote block and write normal normal text

Adding quote blocks from other posts that are not on the same page is trickier because WordPress does not have this feature. If you really want to learn how perform this more complicated process, refer to this post.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Advanced Tip How to add quote blocks from posts that are on a different page. This is a continuation of the post directly above, so make sure you understand how that works, first.

blah blah blah [work in progress… this may take me some time to write].

Quick summary: Click the post #ID number and create a new tab for it; Highlight the desired text and QUOTE it, which will create a new post with the quoted text; unnecessary step, but safest: click on the TEXT button, then copy the quotable text; in the previous tab, click on the TEXT button, paste at the end of the post; when you click on the VISUAL button, you’ll see a normal looking quote block with the new quote. (The part that’s technically unnecessary is switching between VISUAL and TEXT modes, but it makes the process a bit more predictable; either way there are still risks of making mistakes that are confusing and possibly difficult to correct)

 

[PopeBeanieModerator]

LONDON

DUBLIN

MAINE

SAN FRANCISCO

UKRAINE

SPAIN

---

Clock HTML source, if you know how to edit a web page:
https://www.timeanddate.com/clocks/free.html

[PopeBeanieModerator]

I write like an idiot, often. As a moderator I can edit my posts for hours, and I do that way too often. I don’t leave behind a trail of explanations of these edits, as they are often so numerous and the corrections I make are largely just typos and necessary clarifications to thoughts written too quickly. I often think that since I feel strongly about something, readers will know how I’m thinking, which fails me when I should be writing more clearly from the get go.

I’ll spend over an hour on some posts, that’s how unskilled I usually am at thinking out my writing. Worse still, like today, I spent an hour writing something before posting it, hit the Submit button, and it failed to post! I couldn’t get it back.

I lost it because I logged in sometime yesterday, and by the time I finally hit the Submit button on what I wrote today, my login had timed out. Without warning, poof, all my work was gone.

• I should have at least copied my work to the clipboard before hitting the Submit button
• I could have reset today’s automatic logout time by logging out then in again. This would have prevented my loss
• I could have written a more thoroughly thought out draft in a word processor, but that makes it harder to refer back to any posts I’m responding to. HMM, I could just put all those links in the AZ post editor, then copy/paste the final body parts from the word processor. Hey, only took me years to think of that solution.

The wordpress-based software we use is free. Our membership base is too small to support software that costs money. Rebel pays for the internet presence. We lost Think Atheist because it costed much more than AZ. Relatively recently, we saw AtheistNexus die, presumably for lack of funding, but I don’t know for sure.

One point to make here in the Tips group is that we’re lucky to have AZ, even with its imperfections.

[Author]

Posts