The writer's technical guide

Day 3,061, 01:32 • Published in USA Canada • by Ilene Dover


Are you tired of seeing sexy looking articles in the media while your own newspaper looks like wallpaper from the 1980’s?


On the premise that more articles are better than less, and the assumption that with a bit of know-how more people will speak up, this is something of a writer’s guide to newspapers and the BB code that is an integral part of them.


I can't teach you how to write a good article. That's all on you. How to use the various commands and functions in your newspaper to produce a visually appealing outcome? That I can help with!





It will be best if you play along while you’re reading. So, open a new tab, go into your newspaper homepage and click on “Write Article”. Don’t stress, you’re not publishing anything yet!


You’ll see a big text box with some buttons at the top. The big box is where you write the content of your article. We’ll get to that in a minute. First though, the buttons. They look like this:





The first three on the left are exactly what you’d expect if you were in MS Word or something similar. That is, bold, italics and underline. They can be combined, but be careful because they don’t all look good on-screen. For an example:


This text is in bold. It is good for headings and calling attention to specific parts of a paragraph.


This text is in italics. It is hard to read in a big block and you will need to use small paragraphs. In other words, use it sparingly. You will definitely annoy people if you go on. And on. And on, in this style.


This text is in underline. It looks ugly and serves little purpose. Worse, it looks like a hyperlink sometimes.


This text is in bold and underline. Use it if you’re angry, but it looks even uglier than regular underline. ESPECIALLY IF YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS!!!!1


This text is in italics and underline. Good luck getting your point across, because most people mentally sigh when they see it! And then they stop reading...


I could go on, but you probably get the point now.


The next button (the fourth from the left) is a shortcut to inserting an image. You will need an internet hosted image. That means the link should start with http:// and end with .jpg, .png or any of the other image formats. Movies (.gif) also work. You cannot pull images from your computer hard drive. If you want to upload from your hard drive, tiny pic offers a free upload service. The ads and anti-spam suck, but it is still “free” to use.


If you don’t want to use the image shortcut (maybe you write on Google Docs first, like I do), type [.img] Your Pic Here[./img]. Without the dots between the square brackets (I put them in because otherwise the game will look for an image…


Next, links. Click the link button and a window pops up. Past your desired link into the box. The game will then highlight some text “Your Link Here”. Fill in what you want the link to say. It is the difference between:


This is my profile: http://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/8649803


And this is my profile


If you want to type actual BB code, use the following (without the dots):
[.url=http://blah.blah.com]Text for display[./url]


Moving along… Strikethrough. The button looks like S with a horizontal bar through it. Used for humorous purposes mostly, to say something you don’t really want to say. People naturally skip that part. Cool, huh? Meh…


Line breaks are next . They are very useful and important visual breaks, good for separating subjects or topics. The default ERepublik linebreaks look like this:




You can type six dashes (-) in a row instead of using the button. Notice how the text is broken up into digestible blocks now?


More than a few writers (myself included) use wide and thin images as linebreaks. We put them in using the [.IMG]http://my secret link.jpg[/IMG] BB code.


We are nearly there on basic functions, hang in there. The speech bubble button? For emails inside text. Honestly, it's not very useful. I don't know about you but K can’t say I’d be comfortable publishing my email frankly. If you want to use it, it looks like this.

IEatSpam@gmail.com

Or, My fake email addy for spammers and stalkers from ERepublik. See how you can combine different features, by nesting BB commands within each other?


We are into the second to button last now. The opposing arrows. My tooltip says it is “clean” but the button never works for me. Presumably it erases all the existing text in the article content box...


On the right hand side is a button with a green tick. This is by far the most useful button - the preview button. Press it when you’ve finished your first draft and a preview window will appear above the article content box. Use it to check that images are displaying, links appear correctly and the formatting is showing up how it is supposed to. Invariably, something gets missed (trust me!).




If you’re still reading, I'm very impressed! Go and practice with the basic commands first. These next commands are not accessible with buttons. You will need to use BB Code to enter them. That means typing commands within the square brackets…. In all cases, remove the “.” from inside the brackets that you see below if you are going to use them.


FIrstly, the comparatively useless superscript. You would use it for exponents in mathematical formulae. I can’t think of many other uses. The command is [.sup] [./sup]


Superscript has a converse. Subscript. Handy for chemical formulae, like this. H2O : Water. I have found it to be of no value, like superscript. The command is [.sub] [./sub]


Text formatting uses a few other commands. They are all commonsense. You get the same options as MS Word, basically.


[.center] [./center] gives you:

Text centered on the page. It is annoying to read.
Because your eye can’t go back to a consistent
starting point every new line.


Despite the irritation, the center command is very useful for centering images.


As you would expect, [.right] [/.right] gives you:

Right justified text. This is awful for English and is hard to read. Languages that read right to left, like Arabic, find it far very useful. If you use this in an article I will haunt you forever…


Without any commands, left justification (“normal” text like this) is the default.


You can also indent your text.
indents are useful for making lists
Of things to do.
Obviously it doesn’t work if you center the text.


And, finally, the hardest command to use.

It looks very sexy
if you pull it off! 		But getting things looking right... This is hard and takes a long time.

The commands are [.columns]first[.nextcol]second[./columns]


You can extend it to a third or fourth column, or even more (just drop a [.nextcol] in). I've used this to make tables of searchable data, rather than inserting images grabbed from Excel. It is hard work!





I’m have no doubts that there are more commands than I know about and have written here. If you know any more controls, please share them in the comments





I have one last piece of advice for aspiring writers. Always always always have a copy of your article somewhere. Notepad is good. Google Docs is good. Plato can and will eat your article from time to time.

Beware the CSRF attack!