Article Drafts and OmniNerd Markup

OmniNerd has taken its biggest two steps since February's transition to database storage. Way back in March, two ideas came to mind and for about four months the admins and moderators tossed around suggestions and proposals concerning development. Then in August after we all agreed on what it was that we wanted, I began coding our thoughts and now it has all come together in a usable form. It's my pleasure to introduce to you two new features that I believe place OmniNerd on the next tier of greatness, the Article Draft System and OmniNerd Markup.

The more impressive of the two additions is the Article Draft System. Found in your left-hand 'Interact' menu, the 'Draft an Article' link will take you into our new system. From there you can create a new draft or continue working on an existing draft. Unlike with prior OmniNerd articles, writers can now collaborate during the draft phase on this site. We think this will be quite useful as O-nerds can combine their efforts to create their best work. For more information, please check out the new entries in our FAQ.

A secondary product of the article draft system is 'OmniNerd Markup.' For those familiar with HTML and CSS, this is essentially a much simpler alternative. Rather than using cumbersome XML tags to markup your text, you can now employ a few simple and intuitive symbols to do the same work. For those of you already familiar with Wikipedia's markup, this should be quite familiar. For now, the markup is only available in the draft system, but sometime in the very near future, it will be available for use in both news posts and comments.

To put in perspective how much simpler this system is, we've already converted the iTunes article above and the three more recent articles to the new system. It literally only took us a few minutes to do each and within a week or so, we should have all of the old articles converted. With the old system, it took us hours or days to get the formatting correct as everything was done manually with XML. All technical aspects aside, minutes compared to days is quite the improvement. We think you'll agree.

One final note worth making in this gargantuan news post is that though we've added these two new features, they are in no way complete. We've got a lengthy roadmap for expanding both in the ways of structure, functionality, and style. So consider this a good start. We are excited about the future of the site and these new features. If you have constructive feedback, please don't hesitate to contact one of the admins or comment in this news post to let us know what you think.

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0 Nerd-Its

Demo Post by markmcb :: NR7 :: Show

Now that the "OmniNerd Markup" is available for comments too, I thought I\'d demo some features:

Both \'\'emphasis\'\' and \'\'\'strong\'\'\' text can be used.

You can make superscripts1 and subscripts2.

If you had some code or something similar to display, you can use preformatted text:

markmcb$ ls -l
total 0
drwx------   29 markmcb  markmcb   9286 Oct 22 20:48 Folder1
drwxrwxrwx    5 markmcb  markmcb   1370 Apr 15  2005 Folder1
drwxr-xr-x   23 markmcb  markmcb   7182 Oct  9 13:51 Folder1
drwxr-xr-x   11 markmcb  markmcb   3274 Oct  9 19:01 Folder1

The use of hyperlinks is now easier than ever before.

If you want to quote external sources you can use block quotes:

Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah

...or just other o-nerds:

You are sooooo dumb!

My favorite are the lists: