December 06, 2004

• my god how i wish i could delete this post. those things which conspicuously look like links are anything but. My apologies. (bows head in shame). other than the main heading, the links should be (in order) Mandatory Military Service North Korean Main Christians and Happy Christmas Of Korea I'm a bad bad bad poster. HTML is the bane of my existence. Sorry folks. I'll do better next time (if ever there is one).
• uhmyand: I'm kinda lucky that the Great Server Crash wiped out my early attempts to use html. And, the resulting meltdowns. They were pretty funny, but the other MoFites were amazingly patient and kind. I'm too old to learn a new language, but I finally came up with a rather laborious method, which does work. I'm sure there's a better way, but here what I do. Open a new window, or tab, and in it bring up the MonkeyFilter FAQ - it's in the side bar on the home page - bookmarking it is good. Scroll down to the "how do I post a link" section, then copy the html thingie (a href="http://monkeyfilter.com">MonkeyFilter at the ends. Paste it into the Post comment section of the thread as many times as you need for the links you want to present after the first one, which the system thankfully does for you. Set up the sites you want to link to in new windows or tabs. One by one, copy the url for the site, then paste it into one of your html thingies in Post comment to replace 'monkeyfilter.com'. Replace "MonkeyFilter' in the html thingie with your description of the site. When you're done, Preview and check out the links. If they all work, and you don't want to change anything else, Hit Post new comment. So, do any of you cool folks want to explain how to make this more easily? Without actually having to type pointy parentheses?
• Um.. I just type pointy parentheses. I didn't know html before beginning to post at monkeyfilter last year, now I can type < a href="http://blahblahblah.com">too fast< /a> for my own comfort. (I really should spend less time posting.) Practice will make it seem very natural. I also type a lot of < small> and < /small>. (I've purposely put in extra spaces after the first < so that the html is visible.) Preview is your friend - I often check each link just to be sure the address is correct.
• many thanks on the tips. i thought it was right in preview. . .but failed to actually click link for link (uh duh!!). got it right the second time around, but too little too late. cheers
• I can't actually believe people find that section of the FAQ useful. Honestly, I'm crap at explaining things.
• tracicle- the example is what matters. I really don't remember any explation apart from that. And the linkie thingie works. Ray, you!
• So, it's a conscript army. It's still a vibrant democracy (granted, still a little young), and should the majority decide that participation in Iraq is no longer a Good Thing, I'm sure the next round of elections will fix that little problem. The whole military service thing itself, now that the military dictators are finally gone, itself is also subject to the whims of the voters. For now they have decided to keep that particular artifact of the ongoing armistice intact. So I fail to see how ROK could not be counted among the "willing" (whatever that means). In fact, I would argue that participation is a good thing, for several reasons. The primary being that while command and control coordination is always rehearsed in training, it's not until you get into live combat where you see where the real problems lie. Should the situation get hot with the North, there are bound to be lots of conflicts of command between the US and ROK. Iraq presents a good idea to test out things, and if it gets too bad ROK can just pull on out. Secondly, you can't train enough or learn enough when it comes to fighting guerrilla warfare. DPRK has shown no compunction to dressing up their troops as civilians and ambushing from within crowds. Actually, there isn't much that DPRK hasn't been willing to do (name a human rights violation, any violation). Again, Iraq is a good test bed to see how your anti-guerrilla tactics work or don't work. And you can always pull out if it goes too badly. Lastly (and this is the biggie), the US owes you. They owe you big. And that means that those uncomfortable questions of why and how all those financial and business controls are always so tilted against Americans trying to do business in Korea, which happens often to a country with top-tier aspirations and an export heavy economy, get swept under the rug quietly. And this is not a bad thing at all.
• while(stateof things is bad) say "next round of elections will fix things"
• <a href="http://monkeyfilter.com">Here</a> is the html without it being activated. No changes need to be made, it'll work if you copy and paste it. <i>here are some</i> <small>other examples.</small> And one of your links is still broken, so here you go: North Korean Main.
• path, I think it's simpler just to memorize the linking-formula (and other HTNL tags), remembering the URL goes inside the quotation marks. One beauty of Preview is that you can use it to actually create and click on your link, thus ensuring it's valid before you actually post it to the front page.
• Preview is not your friend! It translates well-meaning HTML named entities like &rarr; into UTF-8 sequences like → for no obvious reason. As a result, every time you preview something like &amp;amp;amp; you lose an 'amp;'.
• Monkeyfilter: Preview is not your friend! C'mon, it had to be done.
• bees - when I first entered into the html world, I tried memorizing the stuff with pointy parentheses. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't, especially if I was trying to present several sites in one comment, where some of them took and some didn't, but they all looked the same in format to me. AND NO MATTER WHAT I DID IT STILL WOULDN'T WORK. (Sorry, flash back.) I then realized that I was too old to learn a new language. The copy and paste tactic doesn't take all that long, and it keeps me from making a spectacle of myself, as I did in a couple of early entries into the fray here on MoFi. I must admit, though, that I did some really good melt-downs.
• path - W3Schools has a neat little html tutorial that lets you interactively fool around with creating links and it show you the results.