Yesterday M. Murcek asked for a tutorial on how to use all the thingies available to spiff up comments. I answered his question pretty late, so thought I’d post it here so he and y’all would actually see it. I hope this helps.Under Your Name, you can either go with whatever anonymous nym/nic Fred’s engine provides, or delete it and type in your own (keep it clean — this is a family site — and don’t use someone else’s), or click on Pic-a-Nic, which will give you something else random from Fred’s random anonymizer machine. If you don’t like that you can keep clicking until you find something you like better, but be aware that I probably won’t recognize you unless you are consistent under a single identity, like Zenobia F did for a while when in poetry mode, and a few others (Hemingway, drunk-voice-to-text guy).
Email and website are optional — people mostly don’t give those anymore for security reasons. Safer to share that in the O Club, which is an open chat room not part of the permanent record.
Icons across the bottom from left to right: Bold, Italics, Underline, Strike through, bulleted list, indent, shrink text, grow text, hyperlink. For all of these, highlight the text you want to do something to, then click on the icon.
I don’t know what the square bracket thingy does.
Foto and the square colourful thingy to the right of it are for adding images. Rantburg's collection can be perused here. If you find an image you like, somehow you combine those three thingies to make it work — no doubt there are others here who can clarify that, and then I will also know. This can also somehow be used with images from outside websites, but that really slows down loading the Burg, so we’d prefer you didn’t. Also, as I recall Rantburg dislikes image strings containing dashes — Weasel Zippers comes to mind — so be aware that not everything works.
Whatever you do, please Preview your comment to make sure it does what you intended, otherwise you’ll end up like Dale did yesterday, feeling frustrated about getting 90% of the way there without communicating the particular bit of cleverness you’d intended. ;-)