The following is a brief tutorial on how to post content to buildering.net. Even if you are an elite HTML hacker, it's worth a read to ensure your stories look pretty, and fit within the buildering.net hierarchy.

First, if you haven't already done so, select "create content" from the menu on the right (best to do so in a new browser window so you can still read this). The following is a description of each field on the Create Story page.

Title:

Self Explanatory.

Articles tag box:

Please select one or more (ctrl click) tag that applies to your story.

Buildering - anything related to climbing buildings
Gallery - if your story contains a bunch of pretty pictures. Write-ups to go along with the galleries are welcome.
Links - Other sites of interest.
Store - Stuff to sell. Contact me before posting to this section.
The Departed - Obituaries
Videos, Parkour, Interviews, Letters, Podcast, Miscellaneous - you get the idea.

The buildering.net architecture is driven by the tags system. The main menu at the top of the site returns all stories filtered by the related tag. For example, clicking the Podcast menu item returns all stories tagged as Podcast. The Home menu item is special in that it returns all tags, i.e. all stories ordered by date.

Eventually I'll have menu items for all tags (links, the departed, etc), so don't worry if your story doesn't fit into one of the main menus (and it'll still be on the front page / home).

Body:

Where your story goes.

Although not necessary, knowing a few HTML tags will make your story look a prettier. You may use any HTML tag you'd like, but here's some more useful ones:

Use the "image" div to display pictures within your posts. The image will display to the left, and all text (or other images) will "wrap", i.e. display immediately to the right of the image.

If you stack image divs, that is declare one div after another, the images will display left to right until running out of room, at which point they will continue on the next line.

The max display width for a story is 900px. Please keep your image widths less than this!

I like to keep all my image dimensions similar, e.g. 300x450 for vert images and 450x300 for horiz ones. This way, if I stack images, then I'll get three vertical images displaying on one line, and two horizontal ones.

Similar to the "image" div, only the picture will display on the right hand side of the screen, with text (or other images) wrapping to its left.

Use the "spacer" div if you want to stop all text after the div from wrapping alongside the "image" divs.

For links, simply type the web URL and drupal will automatically convert it into a link.

Split summary at cursor

Stories, when displayed on the home page, only show a summary or "teaser". The user can click "read more" to see the full story. The teaser length is set to 10 lines, but a better way to create your stories is to designate exactly where you'd like the teaser to split.

If you are displaying a large image at the beginning of your story, you must manually split the summary. Otherwise the automatically generated 10 line summary will cut the image in half, or more accurately (and oddly)...DRUPAL BREAKS...causing the site menu bar to jump from the right to the bottom of the page. Sorry, this is a Drupal bug, and there's nothing I can do about it.

The best thing to do, if you want to display an image in your teaser, is include a smaller version of the image (a thumbnail), and split the summary after this image.

Show summary in full view

By deselecting, you can have a completely different teaser, not displayed in the main article.

File attachments.

Upload the pictures, mp3s, or other media to use in your story. Once the files are uploaded to the buildering.net server, you can link to them in in your "image" / "imageR" divs using the www.buildering.net/files/.... path shown in the file description.

If the images are elsewhere online, you may simply link to them but I'd recommend uploading them to buildering.net since lotsa websites come and go, but buildering.net is forever!

Assuming you'll display your images within your story using the "image" divs, it's best to uncheck the "List" box, otherwise your images will appear as attachments at the bottom of your story. Kinda redundant.

That's it. Thanks for reading this and taking the time to learn how to use the new site. I look forward to reading your content!