Practice post - please ignore

Hello Everybody!

Wow, finally took the plunge. :slight_smile:

Been lurking for a few months now, and witnessed all the fun and games with the US election. Now that is out of the way and the FreeWorld is a safer place, I thought I would cough up my 15 bucks and and contribute to the community.

OK, that’s it for now.

Is this where I say “cheers!”?

I like the username. Superstring or M-Theory enthusiast?

I’m reading about all this good stuff in “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene.

Fantastic book!

Proves that the Universe is female (ie has many, many dimensions, hardly any of which are understood by man).

Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, Calabi Yau, glad to have you with us officially!

This will do fine. Welcome to Straight Dope from an old timer. :slight_smile:

Well, welcome we’re happy you’re here.

Now excuse me while I do a little testing of my own.
So Anyway, I’ve been thinking lately,

I'll be surprised I'm sure.

Possibly very surprised.

Okay, here goes, wheeee…

Well that was interesting.

and confusing as well.

I assume it’s not the QUOTE bit that’s confusing you, so:

The CODE tag preserves formatting and spacing, so you can post programming code and not lose any whitespace formatting, which makes it more readable. The PHP tag is a special case of the CODE tag, which not only preserves whitespace, but color-codes keywords, comments, variable names and the like.

To elaborate on that last: PHP is a programming language, and in fact the language that this board was written in. Because of this, the programmers thought it was pretty important, and so included a special tag for it. All of the color-coding is based on how PHP would interpret the code. In your particular case, it thought that your apostrophes were single-quotes, and apparently PHP interprets text enclosed in single quotes in some special way, so it colored that text differently.

I knew I forgot something important. Anyway, here’s an example of what actual PHP code looks like with the PHP tag:


<?php

//incorrect
if($i == 1) echo '$i = 1';

//correct
if($i == 1) {
    echo '$i = 1';
}

?> 

Here I thought PHP was some sort of plastic piping…

I think that’s PVP…

Polyvinyl Phloride?

Now, now, don’t be too hard on yourself, you don’t look a day over March 2001.

Oh, and welcome also to Calamari Yoots, or whatever the hell your name is.
I keed, I keed

Sure – the same element that is used for phloridating water, to prevent tooth decay! :slight_smile:

(It’s also the only element that will react with the noble gases: Xenon hexaphloride was discovered back in the 1960s. The rare mineral Kryptonite is Krypton n-phloride – the hexaphloride being green, the pentaphloride red, and so on.)

:slight_smile:

Holy crap.

20,000 + posts.

And I was surprised to see I had reached 2,000.

::walks off in a daze::

Welcome Calabi. Are you sure you’ve been lurking for months? I would think that you could have guessed that telling us to “ignore” something would only entice us to see what it is about. It’s the nature of this board. :slight_smile:

Why do you think he did it? :wink:

Blimey!

I can´t get anything past you chaps can I?

I have a picture in my mind of Xena in PVC now, after the earlier posts. Is this healthy?

Thanks to all those in the know who took the time to clear that up for me.

Truth was I didn’t even know how to ask what the hell that part meant.

I’m not at all tech savy but your explanations were just right, even for me.

May Heaven’s Finest Blessings Shower Down Upon You! :slight_smile: