Editing conventions

Okay, I'm just starting to get this together, so bear with me.

Whitespace

The first thing you'll notice in writing entries is how truly annoying whitespace can be. There's two modes on Blogger as regards whitespace handling, with one generating a lot of extra, the other not enough. With the switch flipped the way it is, you'll probably notice your posts have a lot of extra whitespace, basically any line break (even after end tags) will create vertical whitespace. It's a bit annoying, but the other setting is actually worse. If you're like me, you'll end up fiddling with your post a bit to get it right. You can always ask me for help, even to do a final copy edit. I don't mind. I'm probably pickier than you are, though I think Roger runs a close second.

Titles

Roger suggested we use "down-style" (or something I can't remember) which means that we only capitalize the first word of a title unless there are words that would naturally be capitalized. See below for subtitles.

Bibliographic format

Take a look at the References & Reading List page. I'm not a stickler, really, but some measure of consistency would be nice.

Styles

The CSS stylesheet for Electric Forest has a few classes that you can use, described below.

There's an "inline" class for inline links. Normally, links are bold (e.g., Google), and if you don't want them to stand out so much within a paragraph, add a class attribute, e.g. (e.g., Google):

  <a class="inline" href="http://www.acme.com/">Acme</a>

Subtitles

If you want to add a subtitle to a post, you can use a class attribute of "subtitle", e.g.:

  <p class="subtitle">The subtitle to this entry.</p>

This will work on spans, paragraphs, or heading elements.

Notes

If you want to add notes in small text, you can use a class attribute of "note", e.g.:

  <p class="note">My note text.</p>

So here's a bit of a note.

I've also been using notes as introductory text to a post.

Footnotes

For footnotes, we're using square-bracketed numerals[1], with the link ID unique within the blog by prefixing a number scheme of your choosing with your initials or name (your "namespace"). You're responsible after that for using unique IDs (so there are no collisions within the blog). Roger seems to have been using things like "roger34", "roger35", etc. Both the <a> and the <p> it links to should have a class attribute with a value of "fn" to pick up the style. Here's some sample markup for a footnote (note that we link directly to the paragraph, not an anchor):

  The last martini<a class="fn" href="#mur003">[1]</a>.
  ...
  <hr align="left" width="33%" />
  <p class="fn" id="mur003">[1] footnote text.</p>

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[1] Though if you want to use surname+year (e.g., "[Steinbeck 1954]"), I don't really have a problem with it.

If there's anything you want to add to either the stylesheet or this post, drop me a line. We don't yet have definition lists or other features, but they can always be added. If this all seems too onerous, ask. I might be willing to do the copy editing for you, and I'm always willing to answer questions.