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 Posted: Nov 01, 2011 - 07:01 PM |
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Joined: Mar 27, 2002
Posts: 18585
Location: Lund, Sweden
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Here I will try to collect some useful tips and tricks regarding using AVRfreaks. Some of them are answers to FAQs, some are advice we give often and some are just gems not so well known.
If you add a tip or trick in a post in this thread I just might like it and incorporate it in this post at the top of the thread, with credits noted. Any corrections are also welcome!
This post is NOT about "netiquette", how to write good questions etc. It is about tech tips here at AVRfreaks (with some deviations).
Tip #1 : Make your code readable with CODE tags
If you paste source code into your post then the forum software will reformat it so that it becomes more or less unreadable, e.g. by losing all indentation it had.
Avoid this by surrounding your code with "code tags". The starting code tag should look like this:
Code:
And the ending one like this:
Make sure that they look exactly like this. If you don't want to type them in, then you can go around this another way:
* Mark the text that is the source code
* Click the Code button above the area where you type your post.
If the code still looks like mumbo-jumbo after submitting, then go back and edit it, making sure you spelled the tags correctly, and that they balance.
Tip #2 : Get a percent sign into a post
Under some circumstances the forum software will fail to accept a post (usually giving Server Error 400). One reason for this might be that the post contains a percent sign. This in turn is an effect of security settings on the server running AVRfreaks.
You can still get that percent sign into your post, though. Type this:
%
into your post at the place where you want a percent sign. (Yes, that is "ampersand, number-sign, three, seven, semicolon".)
Tip #3 : There is an advanced search function available
Look at the top of every page here at AVRfreaks, and you will fins a link to a search page with lots of options. You can specify that you only want posts that contains all words you specify, you can search only in subjects, you can search for post by specific authors, you can search only specific forums etc.
(Sometimes the search function will fail, rendering a totally blank page where you'd expect a search result - I believe that this is an effect of the general rot of the forum software - but that is another story.)
Tip #4 : Don't waste precious screen space for those green border areas to the left and right
Get rid of them by clicking the link Maximize at the top of every forum page.
Tip #5 : Link to a specific post
Sometimes you want to link to a specific post in a certain (long) thread. Do it like this:
* Locate the post you want to link to
* Just to the left of the time-stamp there is a small document icon. Right-click it and select Copy Link Location (or whatever it is called in your browser software).
* Use that link in the post where you want to link to this post.
Tip #6 : Locate your attachments
You know you've posted an attachment but can't find it again? You want a list of all your attachments? Easy!
* Locate a post you've made and click your username.
* In the page that follows, click User Attachment Control Panel.
You are now at a list of all your attachments. You can sort it in many ways, making it easier to find what you're searching for.
Tip #7 : Ignore the "Hacking attempt"
After an attack to this site one page with "emoticons" (smilies) is replaced with the text "Hacking attempt 1". Ignore it. The site runners know of it. It is hopefully benign, and has not been fixed for several years.
Please avoid repeated panic situations by posting about it with exclamation marks and capitals. Please.
Tip #8 : Search this site with Google
When AVRfreaks' own search function fails, them Google might help. You can direct Google to search a specific site, e.g. AVRfreaks. Add
site:www.avrfreaks.net
to the end of your search terms.
Tip # 9 : Learn the ins and outs of formatting posts
Help on the special "formatting language" used at AVRfreaks (and many other sites) might not be so easy to find. Here it is: http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name ... e=bbcode#6 .
That's all at the moment folks!
[Please ignore this, I only have it here for simplifying things when editing this post:
& # 38 ; # 91 ; |
Last edited by JohanEkdahl on Nov 01, 2011 - 07:29 PM; edited 4 times in total
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Posted: Nov 01, 2011 - 07:13 PM |
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Joined: Jul 18, 2005
Posts: 62354
Location: (using avr-gcc in) Finchingfield, Essex, England
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| Great post - of course it deserves stickiness. I'll let Michael's previous one about % float free now. |
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Posted: Nov 01, 2011 - 07:18 PM |
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Joined: Mar 27, 2002
Posts: 18585
Location: Lund, Sweden
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Thank you!
BTW - if you ever decide to edit this (of-course you are free to do that) take care. I have used the usual meta-trick to get the percent-sign-HTML-code into that and it needs to be fxed at every edit. Similarly with the CODE tags (I used [ for the opening brackets). |
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Posted: Nov 22, 2011 - 06:58 PM |
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Joined: Jul 18, 2005
Posts: 62354
Location: (using avr-gcc in) Finchingfield, Essex, England
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I was going to edit the original post to add something I only found out the other day (by editing someone else's post to see how they did it) but as you say I think I'll just add it here...
It's to finally understand the mysterious [ List ] and [ List= ] buttons in the editor. Like all other tags you use these things by putting [ List ] or [ List= ] at the start and [ /List ] (in both cases) at the end but the thing you might never guess in a million years is what you have to put in-between the tags to actually generate a bulleted or numbered and indented list. The trick is to know to use [ * ] for each item to be included.
To type this text so far I've included spaces at the start/end of each tag and will do that for the following explanation. The spaces need to be removed for it to actually work. So first an example that just inserts bullet characters:
[ List ][ * ] Apples
[ * ] Oranges
[ * ] Bananas
[ /List ]
without spaces produces:
While
[ list=1 ][ * ] Veyron
[ * ] Ferrari
[ * ] Porsche
[ /list ]
produces the following in which the =1 says use numbers:
- Veyron
- Ferrari
- Porsche
With list=a says use letters:
- Veyron
- Ferrari
- Porsche
As I'm talking about "tags" I might as well explain the others. Hopefully [ b ], [ i ] and [ u ] (with / versions to end these) are obvious for bold, italic and underline.
The way to use [ quote ] is simply to put it at the start, then some text, then [ /quote ] which looks like:
Quote:
this is a quote
If you want to say who said that you can use [ quote="authors name" ] (the double quotes are vital) which leads to:
authors name wrote:
Did I really write this?
. What you can do is paste in the text that is to be quoted, then highlight it, then simply press the [ quote ] button and it will put in a [ quote ] tag at the start and a [ /quote ] at the end. It's then up to you to add ="something" within the first tag if you want to say who is being quoted. Now I'll come onto the [ url ] tag in a minute but just to say it can be placed WITHIN a [ quote ] tag to achieve something like:
This comes from the useful website
which was done with [ quote="[ url ]www.wikipedia.com[ /url ]" ]This ...[ /quote ] (IYSWIM!)
[/img] (don't ask - my tags are inbalanced somewhere in this complicated post!)
The next tag to explain is the [ img ] one that can be used to embed a picture within a post (rather than as an attachment). The picture has to already exist on the internet somewhere - so if you have some webspace upload it there first. You may want to check the image link first by pasting it into the address bar of your browser (in a separate tab) and then Ctrl-C to copy it from there and Ctrl-V to post it into the editor here. Highlight the entire URL and then press the [ img ] button and it will wrap [ img ] and [ /img ] tags around it so it looks like:
[ img ]http://www.wrightflyer.co.uk/faq.jpg[ /img ]
Without the spaces that shows:
Finally there is the [ url ] tag already briefly mentioned above. If you start some text with http:// or you start text with www.something.something then the site automatically converts what follows into a clickable web link automatically but sometimes the URL doesn't start with either such as elm-chan.org/fsw/ff/00index_e.html and in this case to get it turned into a clickable link you need to add the [ url ] and [ /url ] tags around it to force it to be a hot link.
Oh and there are tags for font color and font size but I bet you can work those out now! |
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Posted: Nov 22, 2011 - 09:33 PM |
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Joined: Oct 30, 2002
Posts: 5720
Location: The Netherlands
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Alternative [ url] syntax is [ url = the_url ] link text [/ url ]
so you get something like:
Read this article on how to write good code.
which was entered as:
Code:
[url=http://xkcd.com/844/]this[/url]
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Posted: Nov 22, 2011 - 09:38 PM |
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Joined: Jul 18, 2005
Posts: 62354
Location: (using avr-gcc in) Finchingfield, Essex, England
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Oh damn I meant to mention that but was getting a bit bored by the end (as the color and size thing testify to!  ) |
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Posted: Nov 22, 2011 - 09:41 PM |
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Joined: Mar 27, 2002
Posts: 18585
Location: Lund, Sweden
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Quote:
It's to finally understand the mysterious [ List ] and [ List= ] buttons in the editor.
Well Cliff.. If you actually follow the link in my Tip # 9 : Learn the ins and outs of formatting posts you will get to a page that cover the "BBCODE" tags that AVRfreaks accepts.
Quote:
The spaces need to be removed for it to actually work.
Or you could use "the percent trick" (but of-course with other numbers) to get the brackets. A lot of tedious work, but it can be done. This is why I keep some numbers handy in my little PM at the end of my tip list. |
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Posted: Nov 10, 2012 - 10:48 AM |
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Joined: Jul 05, 2007
Posts: 962
Location: Greece
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This is a general tip that can be applied to a lot of forums including this one to save time.
Normally in order to check new posts you have to open the AVRfreaks page then click forum and then click View posts since last visit.
I like to save myself some time and jump to the last step directly and this can be easily achieved by adding a bookmark (I keep it in my bookmark bar) to the following link:
View posts since last visit
Alex |
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