Wiki Basics

The wiki has a few features that aren't part of the Edit Page's effects bar or, for lack of an actual name, the stuff to the right of Cancel.

1. To make a another page on the wiki out of any text place square brackets [] around it. This sentence, for example, has square brackets around it. Beware the period.
2. To make a link to a page outside of the wiki place the URL on the left side, inside the square brackets and the text that you want your link to have on the right side.
• No brackets - http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ Astronomy Picture of the Day. (The wiki automatically linkifies all URLs and e-mail addresses.)
• Brackets - Astronomy Picture of the Day.

3. To add an image from anywhere, wiki or otherwise, place it in the brackets.
4. To make a line of text into a header, such as Wiki Basics above, add an exclaimation point ! to the very beginning of the line.
5. To place a chunk of text into its own block, place a space at the very beginning of the line.

This text has a space before it.

6. To figure out how to do something that someone else has already done, click View Page Source or Edit Page on the page in question.
7. To upload an image, pdf, sound, etc. to the wiki, click Files at the top of any page, and it should be self-explanatory from there if you have a file on your computer that you'd like to upload.

HTML Basics

PBwiki currently lacks several word processing features, but this deficiency can be made up for with the internet's main language: HTML. It stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language and it is relatively easy to use, especially in conjunction with a wiki. As a language it has syntax, but it isn't very complex. Take a look at the following example:

<font size=7 color=green face=Courier>Pixelated</font> produces:

As you can probably see, it does what it says. The most basic elements of the syntax are the less than < and greater than > brackets. (Normally, they don't show up if they have a partner, but I know the trick to make them.) Next, there is the tag, which is "font" in this case. The /font at the end of Pixelated signals the earlier font tag to stop. If I didn't put the end tag in, the rest of the text in the document would be large, green, Courier. There are a total of 94 tags, but many of them are obsolete or just plain useless. Some of the ones that are useful and easy to remember are:

<hr> - Horizontal rule (or line, but hl doesn't do anything)

<br> - Break (Ever notice that no matter how many times you press enter, the wiki only
gives you a double space?  This fixes that.  I've got 10 of them here.)

<sup>sup</sup>normal<sub>sub</sub> - Superscript and Subscript

<p>This isn't much of a paragraph.</p> - Paragraph

Notice that hr and br don't have end tags. They are self-contained. If a tag affects something, chances are, it will need to be paired with an end tag. Back to our original example on font effects, the things affected, which are known as attributes, are size, color and face. Attributes are always within the start tag and are always followed by an equal sign, a value and, optionally, quotation marks. Quotation marks are only necessary when a value has a space in it. For example, if you wanted your font face to be Bookman Old Style, it would require quotation marks on either side. Some tags, such as br don't have attributes.

That wraps it up for the basics. For a detailed explanation of all of the tags and their attributes, visit the HTML Reference page on W3schools. The next most widely used "language" on the internet is known as Cascading Style Sheets. It is as much more powerful than HTML as it is more difficult to use, so I'll avoid explaining it until someone has a need to use it. Feel free to learn it (or better yet, just copy from tutorials).

Party time... Excellent.

Later ya'll,

-John

John: YOU ROCK! Awesome tutorial. I'm thinking this might make a good idea for one of our Week 2 Blogs: "write a how-to or tutorial."

-ShareRiff

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