UPDATED: 01:25 04/08/2005 (To include information on max width for images)
17:15 22/01/2006 (Better way of getting images the right width)
00:18 02/03/2006 (Automagic is now live on the site!)

Ok, so what follows is now partially obsolete since DSI now has "automagic" buttons to help you put in links, pictures and some basic styles, however, some people may still be interested in knowing how to do stuff by hand...

To add a link to a message on DSI you need to use what's called an Anchor Tag. Anchor tags take the following form: <a href="location">link text</a>

So to make a link to Google you'd type:

<a href="http://www.google.co.uk">Google</a>

Note that you MUST include the http:// part of a web address or the link will not work!

To include an image in a post you use an Image Tag. Image Tags take the following form:

<img src="location" />

So to get the DSI logo



which is found at: http://www.dontstayin.com/gfx/dsi-60.gif

You type: <img src="http://www.dontstayin.com/gfx/dsi-60.gif" />

One last thing - the maximum width of an image before it gets cropped by the frame around the DSI page is 448 pixels. If your image is bigger than this then you can cause browsers to resize the image by including a width property in the img tag, like so:

<img src="http://www.ashn11.dsl.pipex.com/images/banner.png" width="100%" />

Which results in this:



Instead of this:



Note there is no space between the "100" and the "%"!

To get bold text use a STRONG Tag:

<strong>bold text</strong>

To get italicised text use an I Tag:

<i>italicised text</i>

To learn HTML in general you could do worse than spending a rainy afternoon over at w3schools

I think this should be made easy for the less advanced in tech talk.

1. Add picture/link could be a simple button where you just need to click, thyen simply paste URL

2. Bold/Italic again something simple like highlight the words you want bolded and click on the appropriate button.

Would that be difficult to implement? My brain can no way hold all these prompts that i rarely use but would, if it was made easy.

For those that are struggling with the above and would like "automagic" buttons to do the hard stuff for them (such as inserting links and pictures) I think that a minor change* to DSI is being considered for the future which will give users little whizzy buttons to click on to do common tasks, such as inserting a link.

This won't be until the DSI boys have made sure that everything from the most recent round of changes has been settled. Plus they'd probably like a bit of a rest!

In the meantime you can always cut and paste the sample code given above and edit it to suit your post/message.

(Dr B's post from DaveB's thread also asking for this type of feature removed as this answer covers both! Also new thread "I'd like to see..." added to the forum)

*Just to be clear - by minor I mean the amount of change that is visible to users. Not the amount of work that DaveB and the others will have to do to implement it!

so how do i do this then?

You read this!

Another good site to check out for HTML code, lessions, and tips is www.htmlgoodies.com. A long time ago when I was starting out in website design and coding, I used this site all the time as a quick reference source.

Highly recommended for begins.

Matt

If when trying to post a link you keep getting a error page saying something like:

Server Error in '/' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Unexpected EOF parsing start tag 'a'
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace[...]

It's fairly likely that you're leaving out the " at the end of the address (between it and the angle bracket). Make sure it's there!