Hi, Steve!

I've been poking around your site and I have a few suggestions.

First: Some people seem to have trouble getting paragraphs straight when they post a story. I don't mean they don't know how to write paragraphs, I mean the webification code is smooshing their paragraphs together. Fixing this should be as easy as offering a bit of relevant instruction on the "Post" pages and on the "More information about formatting options" page.

The problem is that what's a paragraph in a word processor is not the same thing as what's a paragraph in a text editor or what's a paragraph on a web page. I'm the kind of guy who will experiment and figure out how to make things work, but not everyone will do this. This is what I've found:

A web page paragraph is a block of text that has <p> and </p> tags around it. When this site's webification code creates a paragraph it looks for a block of text followed by two newlines. If your text contains single newlines, then the webification code will create a single paragraph, but split that paragraph with <br /> tags (line breaks). Line breaks are awesome for poetry, but stink for most everything else.

Near the bottom of each "Post" page it says: "Lines and paragraphs break automatically." I suspect this isn't worded strongly enough. May I suggest: "For paragraphs to be recognized you must have an extra blank line at the end of every paragraph."

On the "More information about formatting options" page I see something down at the bottom of the page that says:

Lines and paragraphs are automatically recognized. The <br /> line break, <p> paragraph and </p> close paragraph tags are inserted automatically. If paragraphs are not recognized simply add a couple blank lines.

While technically correct, it might be confusing for some people. It isn't that paragraphs might not be recognized, it is that for paragraphs to be recognized you must have one blank line between each one (another way to say two newline characters).

Since this is more important than HTML entities I'd place it immediately after the first table about HTML tags. It should probably have a bullet, as should the bit about HTML entities that starts: "Most unusual characters...."

I've also discovered that if you pile up the blank lines (perhaps attempting to create a scene break) the webification process tosses out the extras.

Maybe the text could say:

To create a paragraph place an extra blank line at the end of each paragraph (two newline characters). Spaces and tabs at the beginning of a paragraph are ignored by web browsers.

A single newline will insert a line break tag <br />. Line breaks are useful for poetry or song lyrics.

Extra blank lines are removed. For a scene break insert a string of hyphens, a few sharps (#), or " " in a paragraph by itself (without the double quotes).

Second: From what I can see, to post a story you need to go to "Post" then "Story". Likewise with posting a chapter to a book. This seems like an odd way to organize the site.

I suggest you eliminate the "Post" section and move the various types of posting into their proper sections. Put "Post a Story" under Stories, "Post a Book" under "Books" (to create a new book), and maybe "Post a Chapter" under the web page for that book. For "Forum Topic" I feel it works well to have "Post a New Forum Topic" under each forum and you probably don't need one on the main forums page.

The organization of "Blogs" is not very blog-like. I can see that stories, book chapters, forum topics, and blog entries are the same. What sets them apart is their organization. I don't know how much freedom you have with changing the site coding, but if possible it would be cool to split up "Blogs" by username rather than by entry title. The way it is now, blogs is just another forum, but disorganized. Perhaps "Post a Blog Entry" would go inside "Blogs" or on the user's page inside "Blogs".

Just a few ideas.

Scotty