ForumTipsAndTricks

Enter interesting tips, tricks, and techniques for using the forum.

Go to recent changes (at the top of the menu) to keep track of what's been added since the last time you visited

It's okay to edit other people's work.
The wiki can be improved by each of us. Change formatting. Correct spelling and grammar. Add links. Do what's needed to make the wiki helpful to everyone.

Create Your Own "Home" Page
DaveSmith is an example of a personal home page within the forum. Create your own, then put a bookmark to it in your browser. Then check for messages to you, from time to time. By signing your name, you give readers one-click access to your home page. --DaveSmith

Expect Topics to Have Multiple Authors
Collaborative writing is the heart and soul of this type of forum. Make sure you recognize this when you write a topic. I fell in the vanity trap by initially creating jimjarrettstipoftheday. How silly! Why should there be multiple tip-of-the-day topics when we can all collaborate on one? -- Jim Jarrett

Include Links to Get Out of a Topic
It's easy to get lost in this type of forum. Include liberal cross-reference links. Include a link to get back to a (primary) referring topic. -- Jim Jarrett

Back Links
Search for the name of an interesting page in order to see which pages point to it DickKarpinski

Finding Yourself
Sign changes you've made, then find them all by searching for your name DickKarpinski

Tagging Pages
If you want to tag several pages so you and others can find the whole set, then make up CamelCaseNames for your new tags. Edit one into some page to be tagged. Explain it on its newly created page. Or don't; probably somebody will, eventually. Then you can search and wander tagging whatever pages you like. After you've tagged a few, you can find them all by searching for your tag. This mini-technique is an example of ExtremeIncrementalism. DickKarpinski

More Advanced Tips - Not For the Unwary

Jump Directly to a Topic
You can jump directly to a topic if you know its name using your browser's address bar. Just enter the URL below, subsitituting the correct topic name:

/wiki/scribble.cgi?read=TopicName

How did you get the link in the SystemModeling page to EstherDerby's article?

You can embed HTML, to do most (anything) that HTML allows, including links. In the case of the article the HTML is: <a href="/articles/usefulmetrics.shtml">article</a> Also you could edit any page to see the HTML that was used, and copy it for use on another page.

This forum allows a restricted subset of HTML (text markup and hyperlinks), and strips out anything else. HTML support is glossed over in FormattingConventions.

WikiHelp

Updated: Thursday, August 17, 2006