Writer's Cafe Wizardry - Lesson 7

A Chapter by dw817

Add your own animated .GIFs, advanced methods of horizontal colored lines, and how to never lose your writing no matter what, in comments, new posts, private messages, and replies.

Writer's Cafe Wizardry - Ch 07

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LESSON SEVEN - July 23rd 2013 < >

Good evening, class ! Let's begin.

The first item on the agenda is animated .GIFs. Now - I'm not going to be showing you how to make your own as that can be tedious and complex, but I will show you how to search for them in Google Image Search so you can apply them directly to your pages.

As you know or should, if you attempt to upload an animated .GIF from your hard-drive into Writer's Cafe, it will NOT animate, and only show the first frame. I suspect they did this to discourage people from uploading movie-size animated .GIFs and tying up their servers.

So what can you do ?

Quite simply, rely on other Internet servers to provide it for you.

First off, go HERE. This is a unique search link. We have already told Google that the image MUST be class, ".GIF" and we have told it to additionally search for the word animated. At this point you can either select an image you see in here or modify and add words to the end of "animated," to fine-tune your search for a particular interest.

Once you have the image you want, click on it. If you have your Javascript and cookies in place then a black window will appear showing you the image as it appears animated. If this is not the image you want, press the gray X up in the top-right-hand corner of the selection and choose a different image.

If it is one you want, click, "View Original Image"

Now, if you are using Firefox, it's remarkably easy to insert this into your writing, blog, or private message. As it animates, just press CTRL-A and CTRL-C. Use ALT-TAB or the mouse to select the Internet Tab where your post is. Put the cursor where you want it, and press CTRL-V to paste that animated picture.

You can actually do this with any image from Google Image Search but BE AWARE many websites may restrict access to this picture, especially if it's a full wallpaper, or it will only appear for you. It's always a good idea to download the original picture from Google Image Search to your HD, then re-upload directly into Writer's Cafe from your HD.

The method of pasting from a different web server is good for animated .GIFs as most sites permit the sharing of these, especially if the image is not very big.

To return back to your image selection, return back to where it is seen animated only on the black screen, and press ALT and the LEFT ARROW key. Click the gray X (do NOT press ALT LEFT ARROW KEY instead as this will not put you where you want) and then you will be returned back to your image selections.

* * *

The next item is the familiar > command. While you know it creates a standard horizontal line:

You can configure that line if you like to be colored additionally:

Pretty neat ! Let's see how that was done. To add color to it, you need to type in your message:

<HR style="color:#FF00FF">

for instance to get that nice purple line above.

If you didn't know this, you can short-cut your hexadecimal color entries too. #F0F is just as good as #FF00FF. So when entering color in HTML, you can choose either style. Obviously with 3-characters you have less of a color selection, but it's still good to get your base colors.

#F0F Purple

#F00 Red

#F80 Orange

#DD0 Yellow

#0D0 Green

#00F Blue

* * *

Okay, you've written up this massive comment or reply to someone, you click SEND and then ... ! It messes up ! Either WC hangs and bombs (it happens more often than you think), you lose your Internet connection, or SOMETHING happens - so you lose that nice massive comment you typed.

Frustrating right ? So what can you do ?

The easiest thing is to remember these simple keystrokes. Just before you click send, press CTRL-A, and CTRL-C. Then send it. If for some reason it fouls up and doesn't send your reply, this is now not a problem. You can reload that page, click in that area to comment or reply and press CTRL-V to automatically retype everything you did in earlier.

This is also a good idea to do before sending a new post. It records all your images, HTML, tabulation, fonts, and everything else for that matter.

Sometimes Writer's Cafe will mess up here and completely lose all your work. Just hit the CTRL-A and CTRL-C before posting and new writing and you will always have a backup copy in case it corrupts.

That concludes today's lessons.

* * *

In the next lesson we'll learn about how to get more space for comments, a slightly more advanced course on inserting Youtube videos (including autoplay ability - please use sparingly !), and how to type messages in fonts for your writing that are not listed in the default selections.

See you next week !