Post With Style

Carl Milsted, Jr on Feb 7 19:02:43

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Like with any self-respecting social network, you can use Fnora to share cat photos with your friends and family.

(Click picture to expand.)

But with Fnora you don't have to settle for cats. You can post pictures of vultures playing basketball as well!

(Legal disclaimer: vultures not included.)

OK, that was a joke. Of course you could post a picture of vultures playing basketball on our competition as well if you happen to have a friendly flock of vultures who like to roost in your back yard.

The unusual feature just demonstrated is that you can choose where in your post to place your pictures. That, and the ability to style your posts even to the point of bad taste.

And there's more.

Beyond Cat Photos

Suppose you want to make a big splash with a big post. You might want to break up your post with headings.

Going Deeper

Or even have sub headings.

Getting Really Deep

Oh wow, man! I'm, like, grokking vibrations...

For the B School Wallys

Some people might want to make their post look like a PowerPoint^R slide deck. For those people we have bullet lists:

• Synergize our monetization with our recycling program.
• Replace pay raises with motivational posters
• Outsource user support to Cambodia

And for those go getters, you can do numbered lists as well:

1. Use metronome to optimize chewing speed.
2. Read newspaper while taking shower.
3. 
4. Take cat photos while working out

(Yes, you can place pictures even in lists.)

And for those who love spreadsheets, you can make tables in Fnora.

For Those Who Don't Wear Ties

For those who write computer code instead of PowerPoint^R presentations, Fnora provides styles suitable for discussing computer code:

func InsertFnords (text string) text {
  words := strings.Split(text, " ")
  n := len(words)
  place := Irand(1,23)
  for ;place < n; place += Irand(1,23) {
    words.Insert(place,"fnord") // pseudo code here!
  }
  ret := strings.Join(words," ")
  return ret
}

And for Those Who Wear Bow Ties

Are you an academic who likes to talk shop over the Internet? Maybe you'd like to provide the world with the missing steps in a derivation which the refereed journal had you omit in order to save paper. Or maybe you'd like to communicate to students electronically.

Fnora supports equations.

$\frac{ih}{2\pi }\frac{\partial \psi }{\partial t}=-\frac{h^2}{8{\pi }^2\mu }{\nabla }^2\psi +V(x,y,z)\psi$

And it supports equations without requiring you to do Point and Grunt at a huge array of buttons. The equation above was typed in using the keyboard. That is, you type:

{i h} over {2 pi} {partial psi} over {partial t} = 
- {h sup 2} over { 8 pi sup 2 mu} del sup 2 psi + V(x,y,z) psi

Keep Your Hands At The Keyboard

With the exception of pictures, you can type in all the styles demonstrated above without reaching for your mouse. Instead, Fnora uses an easy to learn and easy to type markup language: QTML. (Quick Type Markup Language)

Remember what we said in the intro about learning to ride a bicycle? Well, learning QTML is the biggest part of that overhead.

But learning enough QTML to write cool posts is far easier than learning to ride a bicycle. Indeed, you could opt to learn some QTML before you even join. Check out the interactive QTML tutorial and play with it. No login necessary. (Then again, if you just want to write paragraphs you can skip the QTML lessons and just remember that a blank line starts a new paragraph.)

Then come back here to continue the Tour.

(And, by the way, you can use QTML to style posts, About pages, comments, and even private messages.)

#1

Stephen J. Douglass on Apr 1, 2023 9:24 PM
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Good stuff. Ghost looks happy.

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