A few months ago I started a thread asking for recommendations for science fiction novels. I wanted to make a master list of all the suggestions including links to the novel on Wikipedia, a Wiki link to the author, the link for the book on Amazon, and maybe a link to a review site as well. Obviously that is a lot of work. Is there any way I can work on it, save it as a draft and then post it when I’m done?
Yup. Write it in a word processor on your machine at home and then post it here when you decide it’s finished.
There’s no such “draft” feature actually here at the website.
Many of us who write longer posts actually compose them in a word processor, spellcheck, etc., and then paste the finished product into the website’s submission box. If you write a lot, putting up with typing into a box 7 lines high is dumb.
Yes but each entry would have 4 hyperlinks… which will look/be different in the word processor
I did figure that I could conserve space on the SDMB post by hyperlinking [1],[2],[3],[4] after each entry for the links to wikipedia/amazon
nm
Only if you don’t take the 4 minutes to figure out how to make them yourself, so that they work in vBulletin.
{URL=“http://YourURLgoesHere”} The text you want to appear goes here.{/URL}
Note: Those must be square brackets to work, not “{ }.”
Those brackets had to be used in the example to prevent them from turning the line into code.
:smack: I didn’t know there was a way to do things without typing out all the code yourself.
I still don’t multi-quote right. :o
ETA: Robert163 I look forward to the thread!
Do a bunch of quotes as you would a single quote, but delete the {/quote} after each. Then put back the deleted close quotes all in a row after the final quote.
So if you have three quotes, each begins with {quote}, with three close quotes {/quote} {/quote} {/quote} after the last one.
Or perhaps better still, use a plain-text editor. Word processors any more elaborate than that tend to mess with your text, possibly in ways that don’t play nicely with the SDMB input edit box. On Windows, use Notepad or any of the more featureful plain-text editors (e.g., Notepad++, TextPad, many others). On Unix/Linux, use vi, emacs, GEdit, etc. Many of these have spell-checkers too.
Learn to create your own links, quote boxes, spoiler tags, size and color changes, smilies, etc. They aren’t hard, and you can quickly and easily learn the ones you like to use the most.
There is a Sticky that describes them all. Hang tight a minute, I’ll find and post a link to it.
Example: That ever-growing compendium of colonoscopy threads that I post from time to time is done that way. I have a private file with all that, and add to it every time there’s a new one.
List of smilies and how to manually enter them into your posts.
List of VBCodes for spoilers, quotes, links, size and color, lots of other formatting stuff.
ETA:
Thread with all kinds of technical user information. Basically, your SDMB users’ technical manual. Post #1 contains a table of contents (with links) to the other pages, including the smilies and VBCodes.
Annoyingly, on Mac, even the basic TextEdit has a lot of the annoying “smart” features. It’s a real pain when you’re writing code and have to keep hitting “undo” every character to turn em-dashes back into minus signs and the like.
Open a TextEdit document and go under Format in the menu bar and choose Make Plain Text.You can make a blank one saved as a template.
If you’ve written the post but not in plain text, do a Command A for Command All, then go under Format and choose Make Plain Text.
It doesn’t even have a “Plain Old Plain Text” mode? That’s truly annoying indeed. But it also sounds truly Apple indeed.
ETA: Oh, wait. I see I posted too fast; kenm seems to have addressed this just above.
That’s if you want nested quotes. For just adding several quotes to one post, I.e. multiquoting, use the multiquote button to the right of the single quote button. You flag all the posts, then open a reply window.
Pro-tip: you can hit the regular quote button on the last selection and it will automatically open the reply window.
Or use the noparse tag:
[NOPARSE][NOPARSE]The text you want to appear goes here.[/NOPARSE][/NOPARSE]
Note that I used it twice here…one for it’s real use, and the other as the example.
If I only used it once - putting in the part you see above - I’d get this:
[NOPARSE]The text you want to appear goes here.[/NOPARSE]
I hand-code vbcode because I’m on my phone 98% of the time, but you shouldn’t feel like you have to, if you don’t want. Write your draft in Notepad and save it as a .txt file. That’s plain text, so it wont try to autocorrect things or change things around on you.
When you want to put a link, paste the URL into its own line on the page, and any flavor text you want the link to show, if any (lots of people just have the URL display). Do that for all of them and when you’re ready to post, copy the whole thing and paste it into the advanced reply text box. Click-&-drag to select the URL, then either
1- cut to the clip board, then select the flavor text and hit the link code button to paste the URL in.
Or
2- click the link button.
So your draft file with two URLs would look like:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
[The link text]
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
[The second link text]
You can do the same thing for the things you want bolded or whatever. Select words, click B button.
Personal opinion only, but for urls I prefer it when people just put the raw url text in their post and let vBulletin turn it into a clickable link. Providing your own display text for the link interferes with readers’ ability to hover over and preview where your link is going. And I’m not clicking a link until/unless I know where it’s going.
I don’t believe that’s vBulletin doing it. I think it’s a tracker that SDMB has installed.
Unless you mean still using the URL tag, but not overriding the text there…then it’s vBulletin.
I just write the post out on this board, copy and paste to a draft email, and then cancel the post on the board.
When ever I’m ready to post, I just do the reverse. Open my email, copy text (hyperlinks and all) and then paste it onto the board.
did you know that you can resize the box? There’s an anchor in the bottom right of the box. Left-click and drag. Make it as large as you like.