Writer's Cafe Wizardry - Lesson 1

A Chapter by dw817

In this lesson you'll learn how to get the most amount of screen space for your writing, basics HTML insertion, Firefox's SeaMonkey, pop-up links, and limitations of uploaded images & Google Sites.

Writer's Cafe Wizardry - Ch 01

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http://dw817.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/new-writers-cafe-wizardry.png?w=640

Hello there !

As you know (or should) I've been in Writer's Cafe now for a few weeks now and there's a couple of things I've found through experimentation that should help ya quite a bit.

This will be an ongoing post that will be updated by LESSON and edited by DATE so check in every Tuesday to see what new additions are added. So I won't be covering everything entirely in this one LESSON so there will be others to follow. Keep an eye out for them.

LESSON ONE - Jun 11/2013

First off, when you are editing a message you may have noticed that what you are typing is not the exact same margins as what will appear in your final post.

To correct this, what you want to do is look in the bottom-right-hand corner of your post area. Grab that corner there and DRAG it across to the RIGHT until the vertical scroll-bar almost vanishes. Then release.

You now have the actual display margins for how your final post will appear and this should make it easier to know exactly how your writings will appear.

OK, let's go over some things you cannot do. You cannot include any images, LINKS, or even change font size or bold in a comment to someone's post. Would be super neat, but they don't allow it.

However, you CAN include any HTML (including images and links) if you are commenting on someone's profile, if you are WRITING your own profile, if you are writing a new post of your own, or even the shout-box (with restrictions).

There are some unusual things you need to remember. When writing a post, you can type direct HTML but must edit it TWICE in order to have it saved correctly. That is, if you are editing or creating a new post and you type raw HTML in there, you need to SAVE, then Re-EDIT and SAVE AGAIN. If you do not and try to view it after the first edit, you will only see the raw HTML you typed and it will not be coded correctly.

Apparently Writer's Cafe only 'injects' the HTML just before you start to edit a post so you will ALWAYS need to edit it twice and save it twice to lock it in (took me a-while to learn this).

A few other things, while you can add whatever HTML you want, if you are using EMBED, or FLASH, or OBJECT, it will often appear perfectly INVISIBLE with no way of knowing if it even was recorded. This makes it quite difficult to keep track of.

What you want to do is download Firefox's own Seamonkey Webpage maker (it's totally free), [LINK] and when you edit a post that you can't see your controls in, press CTRL-A and CTRL-C to copy it to the clipboard FROM Writer's Cafe and then in the Seamonkey Webpage, press CTRL-V to paste it.

From there you can edit raw HTML. Now - a few things you should know. Unfortunately you can't just pick up any document from raw HTML and paste directly into Writer's Cafe.

They have an unusual item that if there is a carriage-return in your document, it is visually displayed in Writer's Cafe, disrupting whatever complex HTML coding you are putting together most of the time.

While you won't need to worry about this for simple things like creating tables, links, images, and fonts, for more advanced things such as direct flash coding, or object references, yes - it can be a problem and they ARE NOT transferred from Seamonkey back again.

In fact, the only way you can do it is to copy the VIEW page of Seamonkey and then manually (like with Notepad) directly paste back the advanced code into Writer's Cafe editor. I had to do this, for instance to insert my streaming music player and streaming video. A pain I know but as you can see the results are well worth it !

OK, that's the tricky stuff. Now here are a few easier HTML tricks. If you type: <hr> anywhere, it creates a full horizontal line all the way across the screen, good for separating your writing. Remember ! It will not appear until you SAVE and then re-edit. All HTML entered is treated this way.

Now while you have the option of using the default LINK icon to add links to your writing, you may have noticed that it links to the same page. Suppose you want the link to open a fresh tab first so the viewer can press Ctrl-W and get right back to your page just before they went there ?

You'll have to use HTML for this. For instance, let's say you want to link to Google and you want the button to appear as [GOOGLE] in bold and it opens a new tab before it appears. Here is how you do it in HTML. Type this out:

<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank"><b>[GOOGLE]</b></a>

I know that might seem like a lot but the more you get used to typing HTML directly into your message, the better you will get at it. And with this, you have the advantage of not having your own page overwritten by a clicked link and a new tab is created instead.

Now here are some interesting limitations Writer's Cafe has placed on uploaded images. If they are animated .GIFs, they do not animate. Some large .PNGs do not have transparent background but appear as the default lowest color in the index. Any .JPG exceeding 500 pixels across is shrunk to 500 pixels (causing blurring).

If you want to get around these limitations you'll have to use a different image server other than Writer's Cafe like Google Sites. This is is what I use.

That's all for now and this concludes lesson one.

If you want extra-credit work, there is quite a bit to keep you busy HERE.

In the next lesson we'll learn about some curious undocumented 'features' in the editor itself (read: errors), how to get any color you want (without using their limited selection), how to vertically center images so they appear at the same level as your text, and learn how to upload an optimal non-blurry icon for your writings.