Updated: 2009/09/21
The Post Guidelines has been simplified.
*ThoughtRobots.com = TR
QUICK MENU
- 1. Copyrights, Ownership and Guide Usage
2. Prohibited Factors
3. Creating Your First Guide
- a) The Web Editor
b) Quick Menu Linking
c) Inserting Images
d) Inserting Video
1. COPYRIGHTS, OWNERSHIP AND GUIDE USAGE
- All original material will have their copyrights reserved to their original authors. If you take snippets from other guides and sources, you have to credit those snippets and sources to their respective authors. However, you CANNOT take the entirety or considerable portions of another person’s guide and credit it as your own at TR, unless you get explicit permission from that original author. Otherwise, you will need to ask the original author to submit that guide here OR link to it within your other guide submissions.
Ownership of the guide belongs to the original author. You may edit and delete your guides at any time.
When you submit a guide at TR, your guide becomes available for public viewing once it becomes approved. TR reserves the right to edit its content for errors and for formatting purposes.
- All guides on TR are prohibited from the following references:
- - gold buying with real currency
- buying, trading, selling accounts
- hacking, botting
- power leveling services
- pyramid schemes
- online gambling, sexual material, mortgage schemes, loan schemes
- sites filled with ads, spamming, affiliate linking
Some mature humor is fine, but for the guides themselves, keep the swearing and vulgarity off.
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This section has been completely simplified to help ease you into Guide creation on this web site. You can format your guides almost any way you want, but have to have the following basic layout:
1) Every sub-section MUST be bolded.
2) Every sub-section content area must be ‘indented’ using the Unordered List feature:
<*ul*>X<*/ul*> – deleting the * leaving no spaces. X is where your content is.
3) A Quick Menu MUST be present to let readers fast-click to an area of your guide. This I can help you with in your first few guides.
4) Please separate your paragraphs with a single blank line.
Ultimately, use my guides and reviews as a reference point. You don’t have to copy it exactly.
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a) The Text Editor
- There are two distinct versions for the Text Editor. There is the default Visual Editor where you can add/edit a guide as if you’re working through a Word document and there is the HTML Editor where you can add/edit a guide as if you’re working through a web page document. If you’re relatively new to web page editing, I would suggest you stick with the Visual Editor. If you’re comfortable enough into dabbing into your own layout and formatting, then I suggest using the HTML Editor. The other difference between the two editors aside from ease-of-use, is that when you save your guide using the Visual Editor, the code in the background is usually littered with many unnecessary extras.
Visual & HTML Editors
1) Media Upload. There are four icons, but the one you will be using is the first one for images. If you want to upload your own videos, you’ll have to use another host to do this. Please scroll down to the "Inserting Video" sub-section below for more information. To get instructions on how to post images in your guide, scroll down to the "Inserting Images" sub-section below.
2) Text Options. In the Visual Editor version, you will see more options here. If you’re familiar with MS Word, then this is nothing new to you. In the HTML Editor, there are less options and a few different ones you won’t see in the VE such as "Ins". Ins creates an underline for your text. It’s normally not used for underlining text, but if you must underline text, you can use this feature.
3) Editor Tabs. This is where you can switch between the Visual and HTML editors.
- b) Quick Menu Linking
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Quick Menu linking allows your readers to quickly jump to a sub-section of your guide. There is a little manual coding involved that you need to do in the HTML Editor. Just follow these steps and you will easily get the hang of it:
1) Format your Quick Menu like this:
Quick Menu
1) Sub-Section 1
2) Sub-Section 2
3) Sub-Section 3
- a) Sub-Sub A
b) Sub-Sub B
c) Sub-Sub C
2) Highlight each of those Sub-Sections and click the Link icon at the top of the editor. Corresponding the Quick Menu number, type in #1 for 1) Sub-Section 1, #2 for 2) Sub-Section 2, etc. In the HTML Editor, it would look something like this:
3) Now click on the HTML Editor tab and go to each Sub-Section in your guide and before each Sub-Section title, type in <*a name="X"*>Y<*/a*> – the asterisks are meant to be deleted with NO space between the triangle brackets and the text inside. X is the number of that section and Y is the Sub-Section title name. In the HTML Editor, it would look something like this:
c) Inserting Images
Uploading Images
1) To insert an image, click the 1st icon next to the Upload/Insert bar above the text formatting bar.
2) Don’t use any of these options. If you want to insert a video, go to Step E on Inserting Videos.
From Step 1 above, a window will open up to let you choose an image from your hard drive and upload it to the server.
Once it finishes the upload, a second window will load up with the image properties.
Thumbnails that link to larger images
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1) The first thing you should look at Size section. Thumbnails are useful if you want to illustrate your guides with large images. To insert a clickable thumbnail, first select the Thumbnail option.
2) Then click on “File URL”.
3) Then click “Insert into Post”. Make sure you click into the position of your guide where you want the image to be posted.
Non-linking images
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If all you want to do is display an image right on the guide itself, know that the image display is 600 pixels wide.
1) To do this, either resize your original image file to 600 pixels wide (in scale to its height without distortion) and select “Full Size” OR simply upload the file at any size and select “Medium” or “Large”. The “Medium” or “Large” settings will automatically adjust the width and height of your image to 600px wide and its ratio height to scale.
2) Make sure you click “None” for the Link URL.
3) Click “Insert into Post” at the spot where you want the image to appear.
At any time, if you accidentally close the Media Manager, you can reopen it again and choose the Gallery tab at the top which will display all your images for the guide.
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d) Inserting Video
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At this time, Thought Robots do not allow members to upload video files to its server due to the super high costs of massive bandwidth usage with video files. Since this is the case, you can use a number of free file hosting services available on the web.
A few suggestions:
- File Hosting
- File Factory.com
- File Dropper
To display videos on Thought Robots, you’ll need them to be FLV format. If you do not already have a video format converter, you can try using Any Video Converter which is free. I would suggest your original video file be recorded and saved as an AVI before you convert it over to FLV. WMV files have been known to become out-of-sync after conversion.
Once you have received the link to your hosted video file, all you have to do to display it in your guide, is use the following tag:
[*flv:http://www.hostedvideosite.com/directory/file.flv AAA BBB] – delete the * leaving no space, AAA = the width of the video and BBB = the height of the video.
Please make sure your video file is no wider than 600 pixels.
*Note that the regular method in embedding flash video into web sites is not supported at Thought Robots.
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Your Mini-Bio consists of the description of yourself and a picture. You can enter that description in your Profile page. As for the picture, just upload one using the image uploader in your profile.
If you already have a Gravatar image, just make sure your email address reflects the one you registered at Gravatar and your mini-bio should already grab that from the site.
The image should be 100 pixels by 100 pixels and in JPEG (jpg) format. If you want help cropping or resizing the image, contact me from the About Us page and I’ll get in touch with you on that.