All Things in Moderation

Frequently Asked Questions for Commenters at ATiM:

Q:  How do I comment?

A:  First, please read the Rules of Engagement–especially Rules #5 and #6.  You must be logged in to a WordPress account in order to comment, as we don’t allow anonymous commenting. You will note that some people on the blog use their real name(s) and some use a handle; we don’t care which way you swing on that issue, but we like being able to refer to folks by name when we get into conversations (which you probably will if you hang around for a while).

Q:  How do I get rid of that Space Invaders avatar—it’s so 1980s (not to mention that it’s freaking okiegirl out a little)?

A:  Click on your name in the upper right hand corner of the web site (inside the black toolbar) and select “Edit My Profile.”  Click on “Change Gravatar” under the avatar you have now, which will open a dialog box giving you a number of options for selecting one; simply follow the instructions in the dialog box and then close it when you’re done (there’s no obvious message telling you when you’re done, but once you’ve uploaded your image you should be good).  You’ll need to refresh the blog page in order to see your new Gravatar and sometimes you may need to go in and clear your browsing history and cookies from your browser for the change to take effect (which will also require you to log back in).

Q:  What is the “Link Dump” on the left-hand side of the page?

A:  Those are links to specific stories that the Administrators of the site have found interesting enough—for various reasons—to bring to the attention of our fellow ATiM-ers.

Q:  How do I add a link?

A:   Suggest it in a comment and sooner or later an Administrator will check it out and more than likely add it.  If we don’t, we’ll let you know why.

Q:  What are the “Sites to Visit in Moderation”?

A:  Those are websites that the Administrators have found useful/amusing/informative/otherwise worth having handy.  Just like the Link Dump, if you think that you have a site that we (collectively) would be interested in you can suggest it in a comment.

Q. I know what day it is. What does the Calendar on the right sidebar do?

A. If you hover over a highlighted, underscored date in the Calendar, you will see a popup list of titles of all posts published that day.  If you click on a highlighted, underscored date in the Calendar, it will take you to the first few lines of all the posts published that day.

Q:  Do I nest or not nest my reply to other commenters?  I see it both ways on here.

A:  We like to think of our blog as a salon or a really great dinner party—everybody here has interesting things to say and we like to be able to “listen” to all of them, so in general we try to not nest our replies.  The convention that we’ve come up with is to bold the specific sentence you’re responding to (sometimes preceded by the commenter’s name, depending on how far down the comment thread you are from the original one) and then respond.  But just like all great dinner parties, you may be having a fascinating “private” conversation with your dinner partner, which isn’t of general interest to the rest of the group, in which case go ahead and use the nesting function.  All comments, whether nested or not, appear on the right hand side of the site in the order that they’re posted.

Q:  What HTML code is allowed in comments?

A:  Bold ([b][/b]), italic ([i][/i]), and active links (the HTML code is in the upper right sidebar)  (obviously, replace the brackets with carats in order for the code to work).

Frequently Asked Questions for Administrators at ATiM:

Q:  How do I add something to the Link Dump or Sites to Visit in Moderation?

A:  Open the Dashboard (click on “All Things in Moderation” in the black toolbar at the top of the page), hover over “Links” and select “Add New”.  Fill in the info about your link, select either “Link Dump” or “Sites to visit in moderation” under “Categories”, scroll down and click the “Blank” option button (under “Targets”) so that your link will open in a new page,  and then click the “Add Link” button in the upper right corner.  Voila!

Q:  How do I post a “Quote of the Day”?

A by okie:  YOU DON’T! Ha ha ha. Send your suggestion to ScottC or lms or michigoose.

Q:  How do I create a post?

A:  Hover your mouse over “All Things in Moderation” in the black toolbar, scroll down to “New” and select “Post.”  From there it’s pretty self-explanatory except that you must “Update” your post every time you make changes or leave it—for some reason “Save Draft” doesn’t seem to do that.  You can choose whether to publish it immediately or schedule it for posting at a specific time (MST, which is what the blog is set to)(or MDT, depending on the time of year), and please select one or more “Categories” for your post—scroll through the options and if you don’t see the one(s) you want feel free to add them.  Assigning tags is up to you (a tag is used by WordPress for internally directing traffic to WordPress blogs), but by making sure we categorize all of our posts they’re easier to search for from the website.

Q:  Can I embed media into a comment?

A:  Yes, although this is probably somewhat like tarragon–a little goes a long way.

In order to embed media from your computer, you must first put it into “Media” library on this blog because you will need a URL. If it is not on the internet, you can upload it from your computer to the “Media” library. (Yes, this means you can upload personal photos from your computer.) From Dashboard, hover over “Media” on the left sidebar and click on “Add New” from the popup menu. Upload your image, fill out the requested information, copy the file URL, and click the “Save all changes” button at the bottom. Proceed to one of the insertion methods below. It is probably easier to size your image before uploading than to resize it at insertion.

There are a couple of ways to get the image into your comment. One is to insert it in your comment before publishing by using html code. The most basic code is: img src=”URL” with a left carat before img and a right carat after the closing quotation mark. You must include “http://” at beginning of the URL. You can also add code to this to resize the image.

Alternatively, and probably easier, is to create your comment, post it, and then immediately click on the “Edit Comment” link—that will take you to a editing box with handy buttons and such so that you don’t have to remember the HTML code.  Wuss!! (j/k—Michigoose)