Advice on posting an article, rather than a question

Hello, I'm a newbie, though I've used forums before (mostly car related).

I've aquired a Meddings M4B drill and have converted the original Newman motor from Star to Delta. I've documented and photographed what I did and I wanted to transpose this into the forum showing how I did it. It would make quite a long single posting.

I've already uploaded my pics to my album in readiness, but have some questions.

1) Should I make a posting and insert the images, and would it be of interest ?

2) What Forum Group should it go into ?

Cheers... Rob.

Either Workshop Tools & Tooling or Manual Machine Tools would be where it could go.

With that many photos break it down into several posts all under the one new thread.

I'm sure it would be of interest, so please go for it.

The main problem is the forum limits the number of characters per post, so the article has to be broken into several parts. My 'Making a Start in FreeCAD' is an example .

Each post is limited to a maximum of about 2500 characters. The exact number varies depending on what else is in the payload such as links to photographs. One thing to avoid is importing a non-standard font, as might happen when pasting from a word processor. The font, and any other features added by the word-processor consumes some of the character count. (Hint: the remove format button, looks like a blue eraser 4th from top right on the edit screen , strips out extra material.)

The forum allows much larger posts to be typed than it will accept, so you only find out if it's over the limit when the send button is used! The author is told how many characters need to be removed, and has to get the count down by editing his material.

With practice, you get a feel for when posts are approaching the limit and can just type them in. However, I prefer to write the whole article offline with a plain text editor, and break neatly it into parts of less than 2500 characters each. After photos have been stored in the album, each part is pasted one at a time into the forum editor, and photos, links etc added, with a reasonable chance the whole will be accepted or only need minor tweaking.

If comments are welcome during publication, allow time between part posts for people to comment. Otherwise, post the whole lot as quickly as you can, so readers don't have time to intrude. I don't know of a way to stop others posting between parts.

Dave

An alternative could be to post your complete article to a file sharing site such as Dropbox or Google Drive, and then post a link to it from here (possibly with a couple of tantalising photos). Of course the site owners would rather you submitted an article for publication which might be why the site doesn't allow uploading of any files other than jpgs!

CONTACT THE EDITORS OF OUR 2 MAGS AND OFFER IT FOR PUBLICATION ! With the interest in VFDs it might be very usefull to many. Noel

Hello

OK, many thanks. I thought about getting it in 'quickly' to try and avoid intermediate posts by others so I've written it off line in Word, with the cpictures I wanted in it so I could just cut and paste it in.

Thanks for the tip about the formatting/removing that.

I note you mention links to pictures also contributing to character count. Is that true for images from your album of images?

Cheers... Rob.

You won't be able to cut and paste as the photos won't show up.

Probably better to do it over several posts as I think people may get bored with a single post containng 39 phots and the text to go with all of them and god forbid we then get people quoting the whole thing and making a two word comment at the end

Edited By JasonB on 04/02/2023 18:39:00

I believe so. I don't have any special insight into what the forum counts as user data and what's part of the system. However, looking at the HTML it appears that external and Album stored images are treated much the same way - just a link. Image links are quite big, so obviously it doesn't all count. For example:

"<img src="https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/sites/7/images/member_albums/144036/918745.jpg" alt="https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/sites/7/images/member_albums/144036/918745.jpg" class="shrinkToFit" width="443" height="330">"

I suspect that in the example title text counts in the post (18 chars) but not the rest. Might experiment later! In my experience text is the problem, not images. I always have to cut out waffle, which is a good thing! Also avoid multi-byte Unicode characters if space is tight. Ordinary English text takes 1 byte per character, but emojis and special characters take 2 or 4 bytes each. ° is 2 bytes, and é is 4 bytes long.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 04/02/2023 18:39:54

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 04/02/2023 18:41:11