Epinion Tips From a Techie
Aug 03 '01 (Updated Aug 04 '01)
The Bottom Line Here's my top list of tips for keeping sane while writing Epinion reviews and essays.
Eventually, you will experience a "dissatisfying event" on Epinions. Either you will mistakenly press [ESCAPE] and realize a split-second too late that you just sent your epinion into the bitbucket, or you post your epinion and see that it's now italicized far beyond the single word you intended because you forgot to close the <I> tag.
Oh, yeah. The italics are still on. There. Better?
Worse still is if your epinion deals with HTML, and you find that clicking the [Edit Opinion] button renders all your & entities into their actual HTML counterparts, causing Epinion's HTML checker to refuse to accept your update.
Here are some tips I've learned the hard way in the time I've been here:
Edit "outside the box". Literally. The <TEXTAREA> box is marginally usable for writing off-the-cuff comments, but painfully inadequate for writing full essays or reviews. Instead, use the word processor or text editor with which you are most comfortable.
Make sure the editor can output text streams, with each paragraph stored as one single line of text, as opposed to a collection of individual lines of text.
This will allow you to focus on writing the epinion, and not on the limited editing capabilities of the <TEXTAREA> widget. Additionally, should you save each new revision under a new name, you'll be able to "go back" to previous versions and see if your changes truly are for the better. In computer programming, this is called revision control and is considered a Good Thing®.
Use cut-n-paste to copy text from your editor to the <TEXTAREA> window. Edit -> Select All, then Edit -> Copy. Then click in the <TEXTAREA> window then Edit -> Paste.
When editing (as opposed to creating the first time) an opinion, highlight the existing text and delete it first before copying the new text onto it.
This will save keep your & entities (such as the > entity I used for the arrow) intact should you need to edit your opinion. Moreover, this will keep you from inadvertently losing work should your browser crash or redraw the Update Opinion page.
Save as text.
[This text courtesy of Epinions member gracef, used with permission.]
Those who use MS Word might want to save their review to a text file and then copy/paste from there. Quotes and some character sequences are often stored as special characters that will be copied and pasted from the Word file. Some browsers handle these fine, but others don't. Further, whenever Epinions changes their database format, as they did during the last big upgrade, all of those characters got changed to garbage box characters. When you save and copy and paste from a text file, all of those characters become ones that Epinions can understand.
[Thanks, gracef! Other tips welcomed.]
Don't Limit Yourself to HTML. [Added in response to Epinions member Kris. (note, the "." is part of her username!)] Epinions® does not allow anything in <angle brackets> besides the HTML tags <I>, <B> and their closing tags. Rather than just limiting yourself to italics and / or bold, make use of the whole alphabet of HTML entities, such as the ® character "®". I use this page below as a reference:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/latin1.html
Use a dictionary. MS Word has a built-in spellchecker. Use it. http://m-w.com and http://dictionary.com are alternatives for those of us not using MS Word. Between these two resources and Epinions' spellchecker, no author has an excuse for misspelling any word. Oh, yes. Obsolete, non-digital, paper-bound artifacts of purporting to serve the same purpose also exist.
This will keep you from incurring the wrath of the spelling raters. Seriously, rampant careless spelling shows apathy toward the reader and disrespect for your work. If you're not going to care about your essay, why should I?
Look at your draft all three ways. Yes, three.
One, you have your Update Opinion page, where you make the edits in the <TEXTAREA> box.
Two, you have your Preview your opinion page, where your spelling errors are highlighted.
At this point, if you open your account in a new window, you'll see your update under the "Unpublished content" header. Click on the title, and Three, you'll see your opinion as the world would when you publish it. In addition to an opportunity to read it for flow, this will bring to light any missing </B> or </I> tags.
From there, open the "Update" link in yet another new window, and you'll have all three views. Between these three windows (and an open dictionary window or volume), you'll be able to make corrections to your HTML, spelling and general flow. In your text editor, of course.
This will allow you to catch simple mistakes in spelling, HTML, and edit them interactively, rather than clicking back and forth, muttering "where is that missing </I> tag supposed to go?!?"
Look at your opinion both ways. Most of the time, you'll see your opinions while logged in. Every so often, log out, search for your user name, then view the opinion.
Rather than logging in and out, another way to learn this information is to download and use a second browser. I just started using MS Internet Explorer for my "member" activities, and Netscape as my "just visiting" views. Before that, the roles were reversed.
This will show show where your work ranks in essay category, and allow you to review your public profile, answering such burning questions such as, "What products did I merely rate, as opposed to write a review?"
Cache is not your friend. Most browsers cache (store) items you've recently downloaded to make your surfing faster. No point downloading the Epinion logo each time - just store in on disk for the time being and read it from disk when the web page calls for it.
That's fine for unchanging pages, but when you're making changes, you need to be aware that when you view the page, you may not be getting it from Epinions. Your browser may be mistakenly showing you the stored page. Learn to force a reload (Shift + CTRL + R for Netscape, F5 for MSIE).
On a related note, sometimes Windows caches the file as well. I edit my text file on another machine, and post it to Epinions on my Windows machine. Because Windows is not aware the file was updated, it sometimes presents me the older version when I open the file in Notepad. To work around this in Windows 98, Start -> Documents, then right click on the file you've updated, and select Quick View. From there click on the Notepad icon and it will load the newest version of the file.
Take a break. Unlike real writing, you're not facing a deadline here. You are tired after all this writing and viewing and correcting. Now is not the time to publish. Sleep on it. Or at least do something that allows your mind and eyes to focus elsewhere. You'll be surprised how many errors you'll find once you reread your work with refreshed eyes. Not just misspellings, but words that to [sic] spellchecker will but don't read correctly. (Note the missing "pass" in the previous sentence after "will".)
Immediately after writing an essay or review, you will see what you expect to see. The words are fresh still in your mind, so your eyes will scan and skip over any missing words (because you intended to type them) and subconsciously correct any correctly spelled word inappropriate in palace. I mean "place". See?
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Epinions.com ID:
timdunn
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Member: Tim Dunn
Location: San Jose, CA USA
Reviews written: 35
Trusted by: 16 members
About Me:
I guess it's official: I'm no longer a newbie!
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