About Fnora Tutorials

Kindergarten is in session! It's time to learn how to play with some neat new toys!

Build Your Social Network

Meet new friends! Reconnect with old friends. Chat with strangers at arm's length. In the tutorials to come, you will learn how to do the social dance to connect with people in a dignified fashion. (Hint: walking up to someone and asking to be their friend is kind of awkward...) You will learn how to group related contacts in your contacts list, and how to apply privacy filters to your posts so that only the correct people see your posts.

[Picture note: the cards above are from the classic version of the game Illuminati -- the greatest tabletop game you have never heard of.]

Bounce Ideas off of Colleagues

Fnora uses [will use] real names. As people you want to communicate with get on board, you will be able to write them -- and not in the brutish and short fashion of text messages. Fnora messages and posts have a roomy feel, and you can style your communication with interesting markup.

Shout Out Your Ideas to the Nation

Public posts on Fnora are visible to search engines and to people who are not logged in. Fnora is not a walled garden! And you are free to promote your content found on other sites -- as long as you don't spam or promote porn/illegal stuff.

Coming eventually, there will be a tagging system so your public posts can interconnect with related posts by other members. Fnora will be an ecosystem, a throwback to the Olde Blogosphere, before spammers and SEOs ruined everything.

And yes, Fnora supports blogs. You are reading one now. You can choose to proclaim ideas in public posts on your personal feed, or create one or more blogs to sort your content by subject. (It is possible to have more than one blogger for a blog as well.)

Share Pictures

Fnora has a picture uploader which allows you to crop, rotate, and adjust color balance before you upload. For those using a real computer, Fnora has a drag and drop picture interface. This can be way easier than using a file picker when you already have the picture's folder open on your desktop.

And Fnora will save a good sized version of your image. Try clicking on any of the images in this "About" page to blow up the images to full size. This feature works for all posts and even comments.

And like this "About" page, you get to decide where in the post you want your image to be.

Do the Math and Show Your Work

Fnora supports the eqn math description language which goes back to the early days of UNIX in the 1970s. eqn is converted into MathML, which is supported by most up to date browsers. Fnora is meant to be a tool for highbrow academic discussion as well as sharing of selfies and food pics.

For example

x = {-b +- sqrt {b sup 2 - 4ac}} over {2a}

becomes:

$x=\frac{-b\pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$

when you surround the first with the QTML eqn tags.

See the interactive QTML tutorial to learn how Fnora incorporates equations (and computer source code).

[Picture note: The Life of Fred books pictures above truly rock -- for any student with a good sense of humor. Highly recommended for home schools or for parents who want to supplement their children's public school math with something fun.]

Take the Tour

For an ordered walkthrough of Fnora features and how to use them, Take the Tour