When posting to Liminal Nation, you can make your contributions more attractive and easier to read by using HTML tags.

The "reply" box will help you format your posts automatically, but if you'd like to really control your words onscreen, click the "source" button (it looks like this: ) and you'll see the tags.

If you're not used to tags, don't worry - they're much simpler than they might seem.

There are two kinds of tags that are used most often: blockquotes and links. You can also use format tags for styling text or hiding spoilers. (Because hardly anyone wants to know what happens next beforehand!)

Blockquotes

Please use these when quoting other posts or material from elsewhere.

Highlighting posts in the Liminal Nation Community will automatically provide a "Quote" button. Clicking that button will automatically copy the highlighted text into the reply window inside blockquote tags.

...Or click "source", then type <blockquote> at the beginning of the quoted materal and </blockquote> at the end. A passage entered as...

<blockquote>Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. </blockquote>

...is displayed as...

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit.

Links

When pointing readers to a web page, it's polite to turn the web address into a clickable link.

For example, rather than simply pasting http://www.sacred-texts.com/ into a message, you can click the "link" button (this one: )and follow the prompts.

...Or click the "source" button and place the link inside an anchor tag (or "a href" tag) like so:

<a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/"> Sacred Texts</a>.

What readers see is:

Sacred Texts.

That's a space href equals quotation mark address quotation mark (inside angle-brackets), then the name you'd like to link followed by slash-a (inside angle-brackets).

Oh, and if you'd like to embed a YouTube video, don't do anything. The Vanilla 2 software will recognize the plain, ordinary address - not the long "embed" link, but the one that looks like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4.

You put that in the "reply" box, hit post, and you'll see the embedded video appear.

Formatting Tags

Once you can see the source, it's also possible to use formatting tags in messages:

<i>Italics</i> creates Italics

and

<b>Bold</b> creates Bold.

If you'd like to talk about something that not everyone will want to see - whether it's photos of your laparoscopic gall bladder removal or the end of the latest episode of Doctor Who - please put it in spoiler tags.

These, like YouTube embeds, can be used without clicking on the "show tags" button. Simply put the secret message between tags:

[spoiler] Rosebud was bitten off at Mount Doom by Soylent Green, which was made from Tyler Durden is Luke's father all along! [/spoiler]

That's square bracket spoiler close square bracket Whatever the spoiler is. square bracket forward slash spoiler close square bracket.

Thanks!