My name is Elizabeth Liddle, and I started this site to be a place where people could discuss controversial positions about life, the universe and everything with minimal tribal rancour (pay no attention to the penguins….)
My motivation for starting the site has been the experience of trying to discuss religion, politics, evolution, the Mind/Brain problem, creationism, ethics, exit polls, probability, intelligent design, and many other topics in venues where positions are strongly held and feelings run high. In most venues, one view dominates, and there is a kind of “resident prior” about the integrity, intelligence and motivation of those who differ from the majority view.
That is why the strapline says: “Park your priors by the door”. They may be adjusted by the time you leave!
I will start the blog off with a series of posts arising from some interesting discussions at Uncommon Descent, which were difficult to pursue because of the blog format over there. I hope that the participants in those discussions will come over here where we can continue them without having to move from squat to squat on other threads, derailing them as we go.
I also hope that other people will join me in posting new OPs, so that it becomes a group blog, and that people will also offer to write guest OPs.
In the mean time, welcome to all, and have a free virtual beer on the house!
Lizzie
Yes, I will. It shouldn’t be even that hard, because it was white before I fidgetted with it. I can’t figure out what I did.
You’ve given me a clue, though. Thanks.
BTW, although I’m sorry to have had to jettison the Quote Comments plug in (it was causing a number of problems), I’ve realised that the new WYSIWYG text window interprets any pasted text complete with formatting. So if you C&P someone’s post, complete with the name and date link, it transfers as a link (as I have done here.
Also, if you can’t stand the WYSIWYG editor, just click on the HTML button (top right) and you are back in HTML land.
Will try to ungrey this window now…
dsgasdgasdg
You don’t say?
(Yes, it’s white now.)
Yeah, that looks better.
I just selected a different skin in the TinyMCE plug-in.
The tricky part was getting rid of that box that said “comment” and hid the buttons on the left. I thought I might have deleted a bit of code that specified the color of the box by mistake, but I hadn’t.
Test.
awesome.
I noticed that Quick Edit does not mess up TeX formatting. So now I can fix the math in my own thread.
test
Since quoting a block of text to comment on is so useful, and since the echo-box has vanished for some reason so I can’t see what my post will look like, I’ll try some experiments and post them here.
<quote>Here is attempt number one to delineate a block of quoted text</quote>
No, that failed, let’s try syntax attempt number 2:
<blockquote>Here is the second attempt to set out a block of quoted text. </blockquote>
No, that failed also. Now to try the quote mark icon above the edit box. First attempt is to click once, enter the test, then click again to close:
clicked the first time. Entering a separate block. Now clicking again.
And now to see if that appeared in a text block.
No, that failed. OK, the next attempt is to type the material I want in the quote block, mark it all, and attempt to use the quote icon to quote the marked text as a block
Oops, after I hit the quote icon and it reformatted, I hit enter and the entire block disappeared. Let’s try it again. I’m going to highlight this very paragraph.
This time, the block UNformatted when I moved the cursor away with the mouse. The block does not look different, but I’ll post and see…
Nope, that failed also. I notice the “quote with reply” option has also been eliminated, so I can’t see the HTML actually being used either.
I’m out of ideas. Does anyone know how to mark a block of text as being a quote taken from elsewhere?
For that matter, can anyone suggest what the quote marks icon does at all, under ANY circumstances? So far, I can get it to indent my entire post or none of it, but nothing else.
After you hit the quote icon and see the indent, enter the quoted text.
Hit return.
You’ll see it’s still indented, but on the next line.
Now hit the quote icon again and you will see the cursor move to the left indicating you are no longer in quote mode.
The quote icon will automatically put you in italics mode.
I’ll give it a try. First some text of mine, then
After you hit the quote icon and see the indent, enter the quoted text.
OK, I did that. I hit the quote icon, saw the indent, entered your text, hit return, hit the quote icon again, and everything unindented. At no time did I see any italics. I’ll try once again. First, hit the quote iconAfter you hit the quote icon and see the indent, enter the quoted text.
Now hit the quote icon again. Same thing. Yes, the cursor moves to the left. When I first hit the quote icon, EVERY LINE got indented even though I hadn’t entered anything yet. I entered something, hit enter, hit quote icon, and the entire post was unindented. Still no sign of any italics.
What did I do wrong?
While I’m at it, what exactly is the HTML being used here? I notice that <i> used to work, but it doesn’t work any more. <blockquote> used to work but now it doesn’t. Is there some way I can look at the raw HTML in your post and just manually copy it?
My source viewer outputs the following:
<
divclass=”comment-content”><blockquote>
<
p>For that matter, can anyone suggest what the quote marks icon does at all, under ANY circumstances? So far, I can get it to indent my entire post or none of it, but nothing else.</p>
</
Let’s try that:
<divclass=”comment content”><blockquote><p>Here is the material intended to be inside the block.</p></blockquote>
And now we’re outside the block. Let’s see what we get.
Beats me.
Plain text.
How did you do that? As you can see from my list of attempts, the quotes don’t work, and manually typing in the HTML doesn’t work. Copying the source output of the page doesn’t work. I see that you did it, but I can’t figure out how.
The above text was written in the HTML mode of the Reply Editor using the following code:
<blockquote>Quoted text.</blockquote>
Plain Text.
The Reply Editor has an HTML button.
Then hit the quote icon again.
OK, I need more advice. When I hit the HTML button, up pops a window called HTML editor. I enter the HTML in the window. That window has a single button, called “cancel”. When I hit it, I leave that window.
Oops, the only exit from the HTML editor window is “cancel”, and when I click that, I lose all my HTML.
I tried posting while the HTML window was still open. The stuff I entered didn’t get posted. I can’t post inside the window, I can’t exit the window. Strange.
The Update button should be in the lower right corner, opposite the Cancel button.
There is a red cancel button in the lower right corner. This is the ONLY button.
Ok, I hit the quote button and it stayed up and returned the cursor to the left.
The quote button works like all the other buttons in most text editors. If you click on it, it remains in the “on” position and everything you type is placed in that mode. Then you move beyond where you wish that mode and then toggle the mode off by hitting the button again.
I just discovered that this editor puts paragraph tags around the paragraph tags produced by my Micorsoft Word editor. I had to edit my comment here to take them out.
I’ll try that. Here’s my plain text, then I’ll quote yours…
The quote button works like all the other buttons in most text editors. If you click on it, it remains in the “on” position and everything you type is placed in that mode. Then you move beyond where you wish that mode and then toggle the mode off by hitting the button again.
While the quote button was on, everything was indented – NOT just the block I was quoting, but the entire post. When I turned the quotes off, everything went full width – NOT just what I quoted, but the entire post. Let’s see if your material (all that was entered with the quote button on) got quoted…
OK, making progress. The quote button insists on quoting the ENTIRE post, no matter when I turn it on, and then unquoting the ENTIRE post no matter when I turn it off. If I post with it on, the entire post is a quote. If I turn it off, none of the post is a quote.
<blockquote>This is a blockquote being written in the HTML editor</blockquote>
This is regular text in the HTML editor outside the blockquote.
A test of other tags.
∇<sup>2</sup>
Ok, now how do I post this? There is a cancel button. Let’s see what happens. First I will move this window over an hit the Post comment button.
Sheesh! My eyes are going crossed.
Could it be a browser-dependent problem?
OK, I guess I’ll find non-HTML ways to indicate quotes, italics, etc. Could be a browser issue, I suppose. Browsers parse HTML to make all the displayable stuff in the software anyway.
Type this line. Hit enter.
Now I hit the quote button again, to end the quote.
It works just fine.
I also tried the “html” button. That gave me a page of html. I added the bold tags around the word “quote” there. On the bottom of the html page (far right) there was an update button. Pressing that got me back to the visual editor, and the word “quote” does appear to be in bold.
You seem to be trying to make it too hard.
There appears to be only a Cancel button in the lower right hand side of the window pane of the HTML editor.
Ok, there was a very thin button below the Cancel button; so thin that I missed it before. And it has no words in it, but if I hover over it, a pound sign appears next to the Path: p bar below.
Trying the HTML editor again. ∇⋅(J/U) = (∇⋅J)/U – (J⋅∇U)/U2.
Superscript sucks, but at least it works.
I did exactly that and it worked once. When I tried it again later, everything was blockquotes or not.
If I typed a line first, hit enter, hit quotes, everything went into quote mode.
I haven’t figure out why it changes from one time to another.
I think our browsers aren’t parsing the HTML of this site the way Elizabeth’s browser is. You’re having the same issues I have.
Hey, look at that. If I write everything in the edit window, it works!
I’m not sure what you folk are doing to get it wrong.
I think, if you cut an paste multiple lines of text, it thinks those are all one paragraph. You might have to actually hit the quote key in the visual editor, and not just paste in something that looks as if in paragraphs.
I hit enter. That above line is not quoted. Now I will set my cursor to the beginning of that line, and hit the quote button. And, voila, it quoted just the one line.
Testing this…
<blockquote>testing this, he said</blockquote>
Tested that.
This is some text entered into notepad to be copy/pasted before trying the quotes.
This is a line of notepad text that will be copy/pasted into the editor with the quotes applied.
We will try to copy/paste this line after turning off quotes.
Nope; doesn’t work.
Will try another comment just typing everything into this editor.