CFC Service Call: What do you need?

[ysabetwordsmith]

This community has a lot of talented members. If there's a service you need -- content submitted, fiction illustrated, writing edited, websites designed, etc. -- here's a chance to speak up. Maybe someone else in the community will have that skill. What do you need?

Comments

HTML help

[dialecticdreamer]

The recent thumb drive debacle has wiped out some sample webpages (free to use, CC license) that I could've used to set up my own site. Does anyone have a /good/ suggestion for where to find new examples? Just typing "free webpage" is overwhelming.

Re: HTML help

[ysabetwordsmith]

I've boosted the signal. I've got a few other readers who do this kind of stuff so maybe someone will know where to look.

Re: HTML help

[dialecticdreamer]

Thanks for the boost. I actually /miss/ a Google product right now: Google Sites. It had /enough/ support and "training wheels" to let me actually /create/ something while slowly learning enough HTML to understand what was behind it. DW is similar, but it doesn't suit everything I need to do with the Heliodrax world in particular.

Re: HTML help

[ellenmillion]

I've heard decent things about Weebly's web builder for making drag-and-drop sites, but have no personal experience with them.

You might try refining your search, too - I popped up some good examples using "free website templates html"

For building your code from scratch, I highly recommend http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp - step by step from the very beginnings, but they cover nearly every topic you'll encounter: I still use it as a resource for advanced php code questions, too.

Re: HTML help

[dialecticdreamer]

Thanks so much for the suggestion of Weebly's. I've got the w3schools bookmarked, and I've needed it just to be able to do HTML links in my posts here. Seriously, I misplace commas and spaces all the time, so coding and I are not natural partners. I've been working on learning how to set up italics and have them /work/. Hence the /marks/ instead.

Re: HTML help

[ellenmillion]

What kind of site are you looking to put together? I half-shudder to suggest it, but Wordpress is pretty easy to work with no coding.

Re: HTML help

[ysabetwordsmith]

I tried Wordpress and found it buggy and crashprone.

Re: HTML help

[dialecticdreamer]

Very, very eventually, a full index like your "Torn World" for a different shared universe. But since my HTML experience is rapidly becoming "turn my hair gray" experience, it's probably not going to happen soon (my original planned start has blown past the calendar with barely a nod!)or with anything more than a simple index at first.

What's the down side to Wordpress?

Re: HTML help

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

my understanding is css is the way to go, though I admit I've ignored my website mostly since AO3.

Re: HTML help

[ellenmillion]

I will echo mdlbear's advice from below - use a color coding text editor! It shows you where your various bits of code close. I use Crimson Editor, but I'm not sure it's supported anymore.

If I were in a different spot right now, I would happily talk about trading services for a basic site like Torn World... but I do not see a break in my schedule before January. Ask me then?

Re: HTML help

[dialecticdreamer]

If I can manage to get a basic "hello world" to work before then on w3school, I will be /proud to burst buttons/.... but I don't expect it. January sounds perfectly reasonable, given /that/ level of fluency on my side!

Re: HTML help

[ysabetwordsmith]

I highly recommend Weebly for drag-and-drop. I can use it, and well, see what icon I use for my webwork. It's not primarily intended as build-from-code-up although there is a code box you can put in.

[mdlbear]

I strongly recommend using a text editor that uses color to highlight the different syntactic elements of HTML. They're more common in the programming world, but they let you edit HTML directly and have it readable in that form. (I use emacs, but that's a matter of religious preference among programmers.)

For previewing my web pages, I just open them in a browser. You can do this at the same time as you're editing, and just refresh the page every so often to see what it looks like.

Another trick you can use on most web pages is "view source", usually bound to CTRL-U (at least in Firefox and Chrome). This shows you the HTML behind the page you're looking at. Feel free to snag ideas from http://steve.savitzky.net/ and http://stephen.savitzky.net/ or any of my other sites.

Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I didn't know about the color-coded editors! That would make HTML massively more legible to me.

Thanks everso for sharing your knowledge.

Re: Wow!

[mdlbear]

You're welcome!

View source on any of my web pages will show you pretty much what it looks like when I'm editing. It's not just the color; I use indentation to make things more readable, and my editor (being designed for programming) uses automatic line wrapping (just like my old electric typewriter) to limit the line length. That not only makes the source more readable, but makes it easier to compare versions.

Re: Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith]

That is amazing. The brown and purple don't help much, the green some, and the blue pops right out. I'd need to tinker with the exact colors if that's an option, but it would make a huge difference for me. So does the paragraph spacing. Most of the time when I see code it's just a big amorphous blob. But color-coding and spacing work very well for me.

Re: Wow!

[mdlbear]

In most editors, emacs included, you can tweak not only colors but font attributes. So elements that are supposed to be italicized show as italics, but *still monospaced* (which again makes them easier to read and edit).

You might give emacs a try -- it's completely cross-platform, and when it starts up it shows you links to its interactive tutorial and built-in documentation (in hypertext, that predates HTML by a decade or two).

If you prefer text to HTML, emacs also has text modes that give you things like quote and parenthesis matching. And of course it's fully programmable -- I use it to post to Dreamwidth using a plug-in called lj-update.

Re: Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Fascinating. It's not something I see an immediate need for, but useful to know.

[alexseanchai]

I need a kick in the pants to get moving again on my work as ardenford. Encouraging-like.

(Also as arielconall but honestly I expect the Arden work to pay better than the Ariel work, which is something of a concern at the moment—one of my courses bait-and-switched us and, while I suppose I could rent the films that are required viewing that we weren't told about beforehand, why in hell should I pay $3 to rent something I could own for $10?)

I think what I want is an honest positive opinion of the story's quality and an honest desire to see more of the story. I am not clear on what would be fair compensation for time taken to read the draft and formulate an honest opinion, and it's not ethical to buy a positive opinion, but surely there's a way to make everybody happy here. (I distinguish here between opinionating on the draft as a reader and opinionating on the draft as an editor. I plan to pay ysabetwordsmith for the latter. Y'know. Once the story's done.)

FYI everything I'll publish under the Arden name will be or at least contain erotica, probably queer erotica (the piece in progress certainly is). The Ariel name is for children's books, but I think what I have written on the piece in progress as Ariel needs to be reworked from the ground up.

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I think what I want is an honest positive opinion of the story's quality and an honest desire to see more of the story. I am not clear on what would be fair compensation for time taken to read the draft and formulate an honest opinion, and it's not ethical to buy a positive opinion, but surely there's a way to make everybody happy here. <<

Some folks make arrangements to beta-read for each other. Some trade other things, like art for reading, or DW points, or whatever. Editing is quite the thriving hobby these days! It can be for fun and feedback, without the intensity of the professional scope. Same with reviews or likes/kudos etc. Ask around and you can probably find some folks who'd be interested.

Re: Hmm...

[alexseanchai]

*nod* Thanks