Adaptive Forest Management

A Note about Attachments

Users of some of the Forest Service forums are accustomed to a file upload feature that highlights “attachments,” and a description of each attachment.

TypePad allow for such as well, but is a bit more subdued in display. The user has three options (which are availiable on FS forums as well):

• Build a hyperlink to a file with an established URL, following standard HTML conventions (or letting the system create them by using the insert link icon provided at the input window).
• Simply provide the URL for a file
• Upload, say, a MS Word document and house it on the “forestpolicy.typepad.com/am” site using the insert file icon at the input window using whatever file name they have.

Users have to be creative in highlighting in text whatever description of hyperlinked or uploaded files they choose to link.

The Typepad system, like most other similar systems is very unsophisticated regarding uploaded files and will just throw them, identified only by filename (ignoring any folders, etc.), into a general hopper for any given blog. I expect that sometime soon TyepPad will get more sophisticated in file management, but right now any sophistication has to be built in after the fact by whoever is the designated web-monkey for the site (me).

Preliminary "Helps" For Contributors

If you are leaving short comments in this or any other blog, you can just type them in the provided window, remembering to leave a name and email address (whether real or fictitious). It’s that simple.

For those Contributors who will "post" things, here are some helpful hints:

• Always compose your "post" in a word processing file. Otherwise you risk losing it all during input/edits, etc.



• The first time you go to the post entry area, look to the bottom of the page and click on "Customize the display for this post." Select the "plain text" mode if you use MS Word, otherwise MS will loadup the resultant file with a bunch of stuff that you don’t see in the MS Word document and at the very least clutter the TypePad system with garbage. If you do not make the switch, at worst TypePad may, on longer documents, flip you into HTML edit mode and unless you understand HTML codes you’ll be lost. And if you try some things to get back to WYSIWYG or "rich text" mode, you may lose your input.
  
  While you are in "Customize the display for this post," scroll down and select "Extended Post" under "Post Screen Configuration" (which will allow you to compartmentalize longer posts into a "post introduction" that people will see automatically and "post continuation" which is a click away for casual readers). And you might as well click on "Track URLs to ping." (You don’t’ have to understand this, just do it.)



• I like to separate long quotes and make them smaller. This is easily done. For those not familiar with HTML tags, this is pretty easy stuff: Simply put {blockquote}{small} directly before the quote, and {/small}{/blockquote} directly after. (Note that the order is reversed, by convention, when undoing a tag command). Note that I substituted {} for <> above since the damn system wouldn't let me show you what I wanted--else I'm too stupid to make it work.



• Most other things are available on the "post" toolbar. Simply highlight what you want bolded, quoted, linked, etc. and then click the toolbar icon. Links are perchance the trickiest. I usually embed the URL for whatever I want linked, directly into my word procesing document right after what I want to highlight as a link. Then, once I’ve entered the document text into the post portal, I cut the URL from the text, highlight what I want linked, click on the link icon, then paste the URL into the window that pops up after the link icon is clicked.

If you need more help you can go to the TypePad’s "Posting to your weblog."