Test

This page is for posters to test comments prior to submitting them to WUWT. Your tests will be deleted in a while, though especially interesting tests, examples, hints, and cool stuff will remain for quite a while longer.

Some things that don’t seem to work any more, or perhaps never did, are kept in Ric Werme’s Guide to WUWT.

Formatting in comments

WordPress does not provide much documentation for the HTML formatting permitted in comments. There are only a few commands that are useful, and a few more that are pretty much useless.

A typical HTML formatting command has the general form of <name>text to be formatted</name>. A common mistake is to forget the end command. Until WordPress gets a preview function, we have to live with it.

N.B. WordPress handles some formatting very differently than web browsers do. A post of mine shows these and less useful commands in action at WUWT.

N.B. You may notice that the underline command, <u>, is missing. WordPress seems to suppress for almost all users, so I’m not including it here. Feel free to try it, don’t expect it to work.

These lines are bracketed

with <pre> and </pre>

Youtube videos

Using the URL for a YouTube video creates a link like any other URL. However, WordPress accepts the HTML for “embedded” videos. From the YouTube page after the video finishes, click on the “embed” button and it will suggest HTML like:

<iframe width="560" height="315"

        src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yaBNjTtCxd4"

        frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

</iframe>

WordPress will convert this into an internal square bracket command, changing the URL and ignoring the dimension. You can use this command yourself, and use its options for dimensions. WordPress converts the above into something like:

Use this form and change the w and h options to suit your interests.

Images in comments

If WordPress thinks a URL refers to an image, it will display the image

instead of creating a link to it. The following rules may be a bit excessive,

but they should work:

1. The URL must end with .jpg, .gif, or .png. (Maybe others.)
2. The URL must be the only thing on the line.
3. This means you don’t use <img>, which WordPress ignores and displays nothing.
4. This means WordPress controls the image size.
5. <iframe> doesn’t work either, it just displays a link to the image.

If you have an image whose URL doesn’t end with the right kind of prefix, there may be two options if the url includes attributes, i.e. if it has a question mark followed by attribute=value pairs separated by ampersands.

Often the attributes just provide information to the server about the source of the URL. In that case, you may be able to just delete everything from the question mark to the end.

For some URLs, e.g. many from FaceBook, the attributes provide lookup information to the server and it can’t be deleted. Most servers don’t bother to check for unfamiliar attributes, so try appending “&xxx=foo.jpg”. This will give you a URL with one of the extensions WordPress will accept.

WordPress will usually scale images to fit the horizontal space available for text. One place it doesn’t is in blockquoted text, there it seems to display fullsize and large images overwrite the rightside nav bar text.

Special characters in comments

Those of us who remember acceptance of ASCII-68 (a specification released in 1968) are often not clever enough to figure out all the nuances of today’s international character sets. Besides, most keyboards lack the keys for those characters, and that’s the real problem. Even if you use a non-ASCII but useful character like ° (as in 23°C) some optical character recognition software or cut and paste operation is likely to change it to 23oC or worse, 230C.

Nevertheless, there are very useful characters that are most reliably entered as HTML character entities:

Various operating systems and applications have mechanisms to let you directly enter character codes. For example, on Microsoft Windows, holding down ALT and typing 248 on the numeric keypad may generate the degree symbol. I may extend the table above to include these some day, but the character entity names are easier to remember, so I recommend them.

Latex markup

WordPress supports Latex. To use it, do something like:

     (Stefan-Boltzmann's law)

to produce

    (Stefan-Boltzmann’s law)

Linking to past comments

Each comment has a URL that links to the start of that comment. This is usually the best way to refer to comment a different post. The URL is “hidden” under the timestamp for that comment. While details vary with operating system and browser, the best way to copy it is to right click on the time stamp near the start of the comment, choose “Copy link location” from the pop-up menu, and paste it into the comment you’re writing. You should see something like http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/15/central-park-in-ushcnv2-5-october-2012-magically-becomes-cooler-in-july-in-the-dust-bowl-years/#comment-1364445.

The “#<label>” at the end of the URL tells a browser where to start the page view. It reads the page from the Web, searches for the label and starts the page view there. As noted above, WordPress will create a link for you, you don’t need to add an <a> command around it.

One way to avoid the moderation queue.

Several keywords doom your comment to the moderation queue. One word, “Anthony,” is caught so that people trying to send a note to Anthony will be intercepted and Anthony should see the message pretty quickly.

If you enter Anthony as An<u>th</u>ony, it appears to not be caught,

so apparently the comparison uses the name with the HTML within it and

sees a mismatch.