The powers-that-be over at Soapblox Central have been hard at work finding ways to enhance your blogging experience. Here are some of the new features that, hopefully, are up and running.
- WYSIWYG editing. Now, instead of dealing with square brackets for links and angle brackets for italics and other html tags, you can edit your posts the same way you edit a word-processing document. Just make sure the “Formatting” box at the top of the write-a-new-post screen is set to “WYSIWYG” (“what you see is what you get,” for the uninitiated), and you should see a series of tools at the bottom of the text box that will allow you to bold, italicize, created bulleted lists, insert links, etc., without having to know a lick of html.
The launch of this feature has reportedly been buggy, so please let us know if you experience problems.
- No more unwanted question marks. At long last, you can cut-and-paste text from your word processor, or from other websites, into soapblox, without worrying that most of the special characters will render as “?” instead of what they were supposed to be. As with the previous item, let us know if you continue to have problems in this respect.
No doubt more can be done. Use the comments to suggest things you'd like to see in future code updates.
Please share widely!
Possibly this all works better in Internet Explorer, but from Firefox it's not obvious how to get blockquotes. For links, happily it uses the standard keyboard shortcut ctl-K, but who knows that ctl-K is the standard keyboad shortcut for links.
which I apparently lack today.
Same thing. I use Firefox and it works fine. Warning — you have to have a carriage return out of the paragraph you want to quote, and then indent the intended 'graph. Otherwise you can't get out. But anyway, it works fine.
These new changes reduce the font size in the box, and have invalidated the handy in-browser SpielCheque that comes with Firefox.
(Very international, sabutai!)
I find I have to right-click on each box and re-enable spell check.
As for the font size, I have no fix.
Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea, It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word And weight for it two say, Weather eye and wring oar write It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long, And eye can put the error rite Its rare lea ever wrong.
To rite with care is quite a feet Of witch won should bee proud, And wee mussed dew the best wee can, Sew flaw's are knot aloud.
Eye have run this poem threw it Your sure reel glad two no, Its letter perfect awl the weigh My chequer tolled me sew.
…it is funny as heck.
David … keep up the good work.
Just when I figured out what the question marks meant to refer to. That’s about as upsetting as when the Germans changed their Rechtschreibung (correct way of writing German) to do away with their s-set (the little character that looks like a “b”) a few years ago in “dass”
<
p>
Whatever. I’ll still use Notepad do do most of my lengthy comments. It’s a nice ASCII resource.
the presence of errant question marks was a good tip-off that the diary poster was likely to be hit-n-run. and although it did cause some newer diarists some honest trouble, the sincere ones would frequently go back and make corrections. but i guess i won’t mind the loss of the marks in comments.
At a certain point in the chain of replies, the new comments stop indenting to the right. Replies I make to one commenter are not further indented and appear as if it is in reply to a comment higher up thread.
<
p>
Compare this section of a thread [linked directly to comment]
<
p>
http://www.bluemassg…
<
p>
With the indentation of the same comments as shown in the post:
<
p>
http://www.bluemassg…
<
p>
Do people like this? I know long, right-moving threads are a problem for most users who view BMG on conventional monitors, so they might like it.
<
p>
If it is in fact well liked, I hope that users are given the option in the future to view threads in the old format.
I’ve looked at old threads and noticed that whole swaths of comments (including titles) are, after a certain point in the thread, italicized or bold. I’d guess something has now changed where if one commenter leaves a bold or italic tag open, it is applied to all comments below.
<
p>
http://www.bluemassg…
<
p>
But just like my comment above, if you click on a comment’s permanent link (date/time stamp) the comments are unaffected and appear in standard font.
<
p>
http://www.bluemassg…
<
p>
I don’t know if that’s you guys or if Soapblox is working on it, but I figured I’d mention it.
I’ll definitely pass that one along!
I like the fact that deeply nested comments get flattened rather then end up as a single column of letters. As tblade's links show, it is always possible to view a single comment and its descendent responses if one really wants to know who is responding to whom.
I'm finding that the WYSIWYG editor tends to append blank lines at the end. It's too eager with the p-tags IMHO.
The fix for me is to preview the comment in AUTO_FORMAT and delete them. Seems like too much dedication.
It also seems to have a double-line skip after a carriage return, and the new line starts one space in for me. Blah.
I think it assumes that a carriage return is a new paragraph. Try shift-return if you want a new line but no paragraph break.