A Primer on Creating Web Pages

To create web pages on this site (or merely add comments to an existing page), you need to register for an account. Once registered and logged into the system, you should see your account name on every web page, in a block along the left-hand edge. One of the items inside that block will be “New web page.” Under that you will see a menu of content types you can create (click on the “New web page” menu item to see brief descriptions of each type and their intended purpose). The types you see will depend on the privileges associated with your account. For most users, a story or event are the types of content you will want to create. Other types serve more specialized purposes and are generally only needed by site administrators. Once you select a content type, you’ll see a page with a number of fields germane to that content type. Fill in all appropriate fields and leave blank any which don’t apply. If a field doesn’t make sense to you, go with the default value. The “Path Alias” field is generally best left blank as the system will automatically insert an appropriate value. Required fields – those which cannot be left blank – are marked with a red asterisk. If your page pertains to a particular neighborhood association or two, then select them from the menu. If your story applies to many neighborhoods or all neighborhoods, then don’t select any (as this will be counterproductive). The neighborhood selection scroll box looks like the image to the right. Chose as many categories from the Topics menu as reasonably apply to your page, but again don’t select too many. Limit your choices to those which best describe your page. The topics selection scroll box looks like the image on the left. You may use a limited set of HTML tags in your text. This page demonstrates the effects of most of them. They are useful to create italics, do bolding, create headlines, create an outline, etc. Alternatively, the “enable rich-text” option may be used for this purpose without the need to know how to use these HTML tags. But the option has its quirks and is not supported on all browsers. It is known to work with Camino or Firefox (recommended browsers), or IE. At this time it does not work with Safari. This option inserts various HTML tags to achieve desired styling effects. You may experience difficulties trying to mix the rich-text editor and manually inserting HTML tags. Once you have entered your text, hit the “Preview” button to see what your page will look like. If you have more than a small amount of text, you’ll see two versions of your page. The first is a “teaser,” a truncated version which will display on pages showing teasers from a number of pages (i.e. syndication), and the second is the full version of your text. You can control where the teaser breaks by inserting a <!--break--> tag. While you can move the break up or down from the default break location, you should be careful not to include too much text in the teaser. Depending upon your privileges, you may be able to attach files for downloading or graphics to display in the page. Because this is a privilege which can be easily abused by InterNet outlaws, you may have to apply for this privilege. You may change your text and hit the “Preview” button as often as you like before submitting your page for publication. Once you are ready to publish, just hit the “Submit” button. Even after publication, as the author of the page, you may still go back and edit it to make changes to the page. [Note: The “Submit” button appears only after you have previewed the page.]