Wikisource

2007-10-20 05:35 pm
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

I have been having altogether too much fun looking around Wikisource. This companion to Wikipedia contains original texts in the public domain, including darned near all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, and Jules Verne. They also have an excellent help page on copyright, which is how I landed there in the first place.

I have way too much to do to be reading my way through Wikisource. I just have to convince myself of that.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

From [livejournal.com profile] patoadam, we get a link to this Guide to Verse Forms by Bob Newman. It's remarkable both in its completeness and the fact that Bob wrote all the examples himself to avoid copyright problems.

mdlbear: (copyleft)
Innovation Happens Elsewhere -- Open Source as Business Strategy by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel.

If you write software and would like to get your company interested in using and creating open source software, you need to do two things: First: read this book -- it's online under a Creative Commons license. Second: get your company to buy the appropriate number of copies, and scatter them around the executive suite.

Can't remember whether I originally got the link from BoingBoing or Slashdot.
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Since I've noticed that a couple of new folks have either joined LJ, or posted after a long absence (waves at [livejournal.com profile] super_star_girl), and since I just spouted off a comment describing the basic HTML tags, here's another take on it, with the rough edges smoothed off.

Here are the essential tags for LJ. You can get away with nothing but these, and let LJ's automatic formatting take care of everything else.

Inside of paragraphs, <em> (emphasis), <strong> (bold), and occasionally <cite> (italics, used for citations) <code> (fixed-width), and <del> (strike-out). You can also use <i>, <b>, <tt>, and <s>, but it's considered cheating. <u> (underline) can also be used, but it's confusing given the almost universal convention that links are underlined. See what I mean?

<hr> (horizontal rule) and <img> (image) have their uses; they are two of the three tags that do not need to be "closed" (see inside the cut). <img> tags need two "attributes" between the "img" and the ">": src="url-of-image" to point to the image, and alt="text" to specify the text that a blind person or search engine will see in place of the image. If an image is just there as a spacer or decoration, you can use alt=" ".

The final essential tag is <a href="url">anchor-text</a>, which makes a link. The "a" comes from "anchor", for reasons that are now mainly historical. On Livejournal, there are two more handy tags that turn into special kinds of link: <lj user="username"> (which doesn't need to be closed) links to a user's profile and journal, and <lj-cut>...</lj-cut> cuts out a long block of text and replaces it with a link. Add a text="link-text" attribute to replace the default "details".

The rest is mostly useful outside of LJ. This is long enough, and probably boring enough, that it needs a cut )

So there you have it. For more details, all the rest of the tags and attributes I've left out, and an excellent reference, see The Bare Bones Guide to HTML.

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