In the simplest case, the content your review, item, article or other SpiderFan contribution can consist of plain text with line breaks to separate each paragraph. To mark a new paragraph, simply hit the ENTER key twice in a row...
...like that. If you don't hit ENTER ENTER at the end of each paragraph, then all of your content will run together in one big block.
You can also use any HTML you wish to use. You may use <i>italic</i> or <b>bold</b> mark-up. We heavily encourage the use of <ol>, <ul> and <li> if you are creating a list of items. In addition, the careful use of <font> tags in the right place is fine. Just save them for special occasions, please.
One of the great things about SpiderFan is that all the reviews, articles, items and indexes are all full of cross-references. Whenever you write content for a review, item or article we're always keen for you to enhance it by adding cross-references to other pages within the site.
Of course, creating a hyperlink is easy. But once your site is full of hyperlinks, it's very difficult to make sure that every hyperlink points to where it's supposed to. At current count, Spider-Fan HTML pages include over 370,000 hyperlinks among it's 7,000+ HTML files.
The site is continually growing and changing. The challenge is to ensure that whenever the site structure is modified that all of the existing links are automatically updated to point to the new location. Your help is critical.
RULE #1: Always use the {{ }} or [[ ]] syntax for SpiderFan cross-references.
There is no rule #2.
The double-brackets syntax will be automatically converted to a cross reference for you. Even more importantly, if the cross-referenced page is relocated, the {{ }} and [[ ]] links will be updated automagically.
To use the SpiderFan markup syntax, simply put the double-braces around your text when entering your review, item or article content. When the page HTML is created then [[Swarm]] will automatically translated into [[Swarm]]. Equally, {{Amazing Spider-Man #1}} will be automatically translated into {{Amazing Spider-Man #1}}.
The difference between curly braces and square brackets is the order in which the page is searched to find a cross-reference.
Use {{ }} to link to Titles and Issues. The search order is as follows:
Use [[ ]] to link to Articles, Items and People. Ths search order means that Titles and Issues are the lowest priority.
Of course this only matters if there is confusion. For example, {{Spider-Woman}} will link to a Spider-Woman comic title. By contrast [[Spider-Woman]] will link to the Character article for Spider-Woman. If you learn the difference between them then you can be sure your links will always point to the right place.
MORE TO GO HERE... talk about story name/arc matching, etc.
Often you may wish to link to other web-sites. When you do this, please do it with a nice simple href. E.g. to create a link like this one to Amazon you would use this:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/">Amazon</a>.
The two rules of off-site linking are:
That last one is important. It can take you ten seconds to make an offsite link. Then somebody needs to check it periodically for ever and ever to make sure the link is still alive and valid.