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Discussion: Reading
Nothing. It's not your fault. It was an error on our part, one which has been fixed. Your text is intact and in place for folks to read.
For those who care, we had a database column that was inadvertently defined as a length-255 string instead of an unlimited-length text column. Oops!
If that's the worst bug we ever commit, we'll be doing ok...
Wefarrand, I've learned also that it is helpful to put a double line space between paragraphs in your story so that the paragraph formatting kicks in. Also, you might want to start your excerpt at the beginning of the book instead of chapter 5. We haven't actually stated that they have to be the first 5,000 words, but I think that will be the best place for people who read to start and make their reviews. Let's see how this goes with a few readers and then we'll be able to give better advice on that.
Question, (maybe the wrong spot, if so sorry) but I'm confused about using "Markdown" for formatting a submission, looked at that still confused - sort of the same as saving to an html format? And above you suggest double line space between paragraphs. I take it it's not a straight cut and paste in, but do I need html coding or such, or just double spacing at paragraphs? And PS, Nathan hello, I met you at PNWA conference and finally made it here. The site looks great but (whisper) you kinda need to fix the miss spelt word in your book blip on the cover page.
alex
Alex's active submissions:
Running a Black Tide
Thanks for asking!
We settled on markdown as an entry format for submissions because a) it already exists and we didn't have to invent it, and b) for ordinary text it's very straightforward to use. Not sure if you've seen this, but we added some more comprehensive formatting guidelines the other day to the New Submission page; you can find them here:
http://www.longtalepress.com/writerzone/excerptformatting
The goal was to make it easy for writers to preserve the essential formatting of their excerpts without forcing them to do laborious HTML coding. As the Markdown homepage nicely sums it up: HTML is a format for publishing on the web; Markdown is a format for writing on the web.
If you do upload a fully HTML-tagged (well, minus the HTML and BODY tags, of course) excerpt, Markdown will honor your tagging and add none of its own. So that's one option. But if you want an easier option, format your entry more or less like you would instinctively do it in an e-mail message; Markdown will turn it into browser-friendly HTML that pretty much does what you want.
On my to-do list is to add some kind of Preview function to the New Submission wizard so writers can make sure things look like they want before really submitting anything, so that should help too. Either way, having a clean experience for writers to submit their work is of paramount importance to us, so thank you for your feedback and please let us know if there's anything else that for whatever reason could be better.
Er, oops, color me embarassed. I forgot that Markdown applies to Forum posts, too, and didn't code that URL properly. Let's try that again:
Visit http://www.longtalepress.com/writerzone/excerptformatting for our formatting guidelines.
Alex, Thank you for coming by. And thanks for pointing out the typo. I've noticed a few through the site and as soon as we have everything actually working, we'll be fixing the annoying but less critical glitches. And Welcome to Long Tale!
Wayzgoose
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I am having trouble pulling up the full text of the excerpts. I get only a couple of lines, followed by the thword "Review" in red, which takes me to the review form. I'm a little dense. What am I doing wrong?