Write Your Name

We will create a pages about ourselves and later share them with each other. This works better later if you pay careful attention now.

Every site has a Welcome Visitors page which follows a simple formula made even simpler by the two gray form-like fields called Factories. Work on the first field now. It has instructions that begin.

You probably answer to many names. But choosing the right name here is important. It should be unique in your community but not long and complicated making it hard to remember. I call myself Ward Cunningham even though my real name is longer. I like to go by just Ward, but I don't here because it isn't sufficiently unique.

Double-click the first field now and type your name, with capitals and spaces, enclosed in double square brackets. The brackets make this be a link. Type cmd/alt-s.

You should see your name glowing blue like most every other link on the world-wide web. This link is a wiki internal link. Javascript makes it do special things.

When you double-click a Factory it turns into a Paragraph. When editing you can learn the markup for Paragraphs by typing cmd/alt-i for information.

Click your link to make a page that describes you as you relate to this community. We'll do this in a couple of steps that will become second nature soon enough. Now I will explain how and why for each step. Read carefully.

You've clicked the link to a page with your name as a the title. This should be a ghostly transparent page showing you that it doesn't exist yet.

The page should have your name as its title, properly spaced and capitalized. If it isn't right, use your browser's back button to go back. Try clicking again. Maybe edit your link first? Maybe reload the browser with just your welcome page first to clear anything else that might have gone wrong. You want this right because the capitalization it shows will stick.

Click the "create new blank page" button. The page becomes opaque and empty, ready for writing.

We start every page with a sentence or two that explains the page. What you write here will travel further and faster than the rest of the page. Make it simple and useful.

Get ready to write the synopsis for your first page. Just answer some simple questions by writing something like, "I live in Garden Home, work at New Relic, and have been attending most Dorkbot meetings for four years."

Press the + button in the very lower right of your new page. This adds a new Factory. Double-click the factory and type your synopsis.

If you press return while typing the editor saves the Paragraph and starts a new one. Backspace will undo this returning to the preceding paragraph. We call this split and join while editing.

Use split to write another paragraph about yourself that dorks would find interesting. Mention what you bring to meetings. I'd mention my electric bike.

If you have a thumbnail sized image of yourself try adding that to your page. Create another Factory and drag the image from your desktop to the Factory. If this doesn't work you can double-click the Factory and erase everything to make it go away.

By now you should be wondering what everyone else is writing so take a break before we go on to Federate Everybody