Special to the Head SnowFlake Committee
How to Format the Tony Snow Frontpage
Some of my fellow SnowFlakes have expressed interest in helping to maintain the Tony Snow live thread, but are worried that they may not have the HTML skills required to do the usual formatting. The dirty little secret is that you don't need to be a webmaster to do this. You have a fairly user friendly HTML editor on you computer now: Outlook Express.
There are a number of Freeware/Shareware HTML editors out there, and if you are comfortable with one, by all means, use it. Most of what I am doing here will still apply. However, Outlook Express has some advantages, not the least of which is that it is almost certainly installed on your computer already. I use it all the time, and in fact, I am using it to compose this.
This may seem like a lot, but it's not. When I am doing this for real, I click on a "Tony.eml" file that's on my desktop, click on a link to Tony's home page, copy and paste twice, and I am done. It takes all of 30 seconds. Just try it. No one is born knowing how to do these things.
So let's begin...
First, start Outlook Express. Note this is different from just "Outlook". It should be in your "Accessories" group off of the start menu.
It should look like this:
If you haven't used it before, you may get some dialogs about initializing you email accounts, etc. Just keep hitting "Cancel" until you get to the main program.
Next, Click the "Create..." button on the top left, to get a "New Message" window:
You may not see the tabs, yet. Click on "View" and make sure that "Source Edit" is checked:
You will also need to check the Format menu and make sure that "Rich Text (HTML)" is checked, and " Send pictures with Message" is unchecked:
You need to watch the "Send Pictures with Message" setting. That is used if you want to send the pictures in an email, and interferes with the ability of the graphics to display from the Web.
Now, click on the "Source" tab, below. Delete all the gobbledygook that you see there, and paste in the prepared template.
For your convenience, a slightly modified version of saveliberty's original is at the following URL: (URL is geek for a web address)
I know it looks awful, but just click the link, and paste it in.
Go back to the edit tab and you should see this:
Once you gotten this far, you can "save as" this message as an eml file, after which you can call it up to start a new thread.
Now, you need to get the highlights of today's show. Bring up
http://www.tonysnow.com in your browser. Scroll over to the "On the show today" section, and using you mouse, select the text and graphics there and "copy" it to the clipboard. Hint: try to select "whole" lines by dragging your mouse along the left most edge of the region.
Now, go back to your template, select the text "*** insert topics from Tony's web site here ***", from the "edit" tab.
And paste over it:
Because I am a bit anal retentive about such things, I usually add a "new line" at the end of the titles, so the graphics line up nice:
And for all intents and purposes, you are done with the formatting. One minor irritation, the html that Outlook Express generates is intended for a standalone web page, some of the stuff at the beginning interferes with the use here.
You need to go to the source tab, and select everything between the <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> tag (the angle bracket thingies are called tags) and the </BODY> tag.
For example:
Now just copy and paste the selected text into the "Body of Thread" section of the web form and you're good to go. Be sure to check "Preview" to make sure that the pictures are displaying.
Troubleshooting:
This is more of a problem with you are creating a graphical message from scratch, but you really have to watch that "Send Pictures with Message" setting on the Format menu. It needs to be clear. If it is checked, your graphics won't show online.
But its easy to fix. If you go over to the Source tab, you may see the url to the file looks like this:
src="mhtml:mid://00000159/!http://mywebpages.comcast.net/dinasour/HPIM0762_DCE_DCE.JPG"
You need to get rid of the stuff at the beginning so that it looks like a normal web address:
Don't worry if you do it wrong, your computer won't explode, and if it doesn't look right, you can always start over.
Now, the hard part: the post itself. This is what I do:
First select New/Activism from the forums menu, then click "Post"
Title of Thread: The Tony Snow Show Thread - [Today's Date]
Topics: news
Keywords: FOXNEWS; TALKRADIO; TONYSNOW; TONYSNOWSHOW; WOOF
Author: Tony Snow
Date Published: [Today's Date]
Source: The Tony Snow Show
Body of thread: HTML from above
This is an excerpt: Unchecked
Comment: anything else you might want to say
Extra Credit.
You can use this method to format your own messages, or your FR home page. You see on the tool bar a lot of word style formatting tools, which I will assume that you already know how to use. The HTML tools are the last three and are explained as follows:
Draw a horizontal line.
As you can see, I like this one a lot.
Insert a hyperlink
To use this, select the text that you want to be a link, click on the tool, and enter the web address of the page you are linking.
Insert a picture.
Unfortunately, the picture has to already be on the web or no one will be able to see it.
You can find various paid and pseudo-free web hosting services out there, but you may already be signed up for one and don't know it. If you have broadband, your ISP may give you space for a "personal web page" and such.
That is what I am using here. I use a program called "FTP" to teleport the files from my computer into cyberspace and then I can reference them with the "...mywebpages.comcast.net/dinasour..." URL that you see here.
Check out your ISP's main web site to see.
More Extra Credit:
I mentioned earlier, you can use other HTML editors to do this. The one that I use from time to time is called Xinha.
It integrates directly into the Firefox browser and looks like this:
It can be convenient when you want to post a quick graphic to harass the Sean Hannity thread.
Well, that's about it. If you have any questions, y'all know where to find me.
