User talk:Whiteflame

Welcome!

Hi there and welcome to Shifti! You may notice the admins like myself doing a little housekeeping. I've added a few things to your poetry posts. There is a [[Category:Poem]] that will fit your works better. --Buck 15:52, 24 December 2007 (EST)

Also, you may have noticed that I reformatted your poems a bit; there's "<poem></poem>" tags you can wrap around text to prevent line breaks from being ignored as happens with regular wikitext formatting. And I've added you to the author usergroup so that you can protect your pages from editing by others if you choose. Bryan 16:12, 24 December 2007 (EST)

Thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction! I plan on adding a whole bunch more poems and reorganizing my page a bit to accommodate them. On another note, I was wondering if the poems that I have posted are currently protected, being on my user page. Whiteflame 18:27, 24 December 2007 (EST)

Stories are not typically protected from others unless two things happen. 1) It can be protected using the "Protect" tab on the top of the page. 2) It's put in your userspace. The way you've posted them right now, they're in the normal space. If you wish to keep them in your own user space in the future, use this as a model: [[User:Whiteflame/Poem Title]]. Otherwise, just click "protect". As an Author here you have that ability as well. --Buck 18:40, 24 December 2007 (EST)

Just to clarify, anything in your own userspace, only you and the site administrators can edit. It's thus not necessary to protect your own user page. But if you create anything without the model I used above, it'll end up in the "main namespace" of the site and thus be editable by anybody. Creating a link [[that looks like this]] will put it into the main namepace. [[User:Username/Like This]] will put it into a specific user's own namespace. --Buck 19:24, 24 December 2007 (EST)

That makes much more sense now. I am convinced that my ineptness with electronics will one day get the better of me. :-) Whiteflame 19:30, 24 December 2007 (EST)

No worries, you've got a couple of experienced admins standing by to help out. Learning by doing is a good approach to wikis since it's easy to clean up if things go wrong; there's nothing you can break that we can't fix. :) Bryan 19:57, 24 December 2007 (EST)

MIDI files

I'm actually not sure whether the uploading of midi files is currently enabled on Shifti - I'm on vacation right now and don't have the passwords for the server handy, so I can't go digging in the configuration file to check on this. But if you find that you can't, hang on to them for a few days and when I get back I can probably enable that for you. MIDI files generally aren't large so I'm sure Shadowwolf won't mind (he owns the server and pays for the bandwidth so he gets final say over resource usage :) Bryan 20:36, 24 December 2007 (EST)

If all else fails, I will try to find some other site to upload them and perhaps create an external link. Unfortunately, I have finished everything of the piece except for the last ten measures of the fourth movement. I absolutely cannot make up my mind on them. It's not even like it is the end of the entire work! I must warn you that the MIDI's sound a bit odd to the ear as they were derived from the notation software I use. Perhaps, one day an orchestra will perform it, but until then, I am stuck with MIDI's. Whiteflame 20:51, 24 December 2007 (EST)

Laying in Bed One Night in June

I notice you've removed all content from Laying in Bed One Night in June. Would you like the page to be deleted entirely? In future, you can make this request without being asked each time by adding {{request deletion}} to the page in question. Bryan 13:02, 26 December 2007 (EST)

Yes, I would like it to be deleted. "Lie vs. lay" has to be one of the most annoying confusions in the English language. Sorry about that. At least I am learning wiki magic. :-) ¡Gracias! Whiteflame 13:15, 26 December 2007 (EST)

Heh. One other bit of wiki magic that might be useful in similar situations; if you replace an article's text with "#REDIRECT Lying in Bed One Night in June", then whenever someone visits that article they'll be bounced straight over to the redirected-to page. Redirects get automatically created when pages are moved, for example, so that old links don't break as a result. I'll delete this one outright, though, since I presume you'd rather not have incorrect titles linking here. Bryan 13:20, 26 December 2007 (EST)

Non-TF categories

I only just now saw your note on your userpage about not categorizing non-TF poetry as "poetry", after having gone through and done all that myself. Sorry about that, my cleanerfish instincts from Wikipedia are very strong.

For a long while now I've been thinking about creating an explicit "Non-TF" category to hold the few items on this site that don't qualify as TF-oriented, if you don't mind I'll start with these this evening when I get home (I'm currently on the road and don't want to get into making any significant structural changes to Shifti until I'm back at my main computer where I keep my notes :) Bryan 13:20, 26 December 2007 (EST)

TF is such a broad category, and I think it sometimes becomes difficult to classify certain works. In respect to this, A number of my poems make reference to transformation or are told from another animals perspective. The question is, "what exactly defines a work of transformation?" Is it a change of body, mind, or the notions of a different feeling or thought? I'm just getting philosophical again. Whiteflame 13:36, 26 December 2007 (EST)

I would tend to be quite liberal about what would fall under the "TF" category. However, I think most people would agree that a short poem about punctuation would fit nicely into a "non-TF" category. :) Bryan 22:04, 26 December 2007 (EST)

No need to worry. If I possessed cleanerfish instincts, perhaps I would have noticed the mistake before posting. Whiteflame 13:36, 26 December 2007 (EST)

There. Not only did I create a "Non-TF" category, but you've now got the "Non-TF poems" subcategory entirely to yourself at the moment. That way they're still categorized as poems but you don't have to worry about the main poem category getting "cluttered" :) Bryan 01:15, 27 December 2007 (EST)

Catastrophe...

I'm curious, by the way, as to why you split the story "Catastrophe..." into two pages. I notice that each one contains exactly one fewer section header than the number that would cause Shifti to automatically create a table of contents, was it perhaps to avoid having a table of contents appear? If so, there's a better way to do it; simply include the magic word "__NOTOC__" anywhere in the page (near the top where the table of contents would normally appear is probably best) and a table of contents won't be generated. Bryan 01:15, 27 December 2007 (EST)

I'm sorry that I didn't respond sooner. Actually, there is no particular reason why I broke the story up the way I did. I didn't want to place everything on the same page because I will be adding chapters later. I guess one could have done it differently. I just figured that since I have six chapters, two sets of three is a nice even division. Whiteflame 12:31, 31 December 2007 (EST)

Template:My stories

Hi, just thought I should drop a note here since I imagine most authors won't be regularly checking Help:Templates for updates. I've finally added a template that I should have created long ago, a tag to put on userpages to facilitate linking to your personal story category; Template:My stories. If you want (it's entirely optional), just stick this code at the top of your userpage to create a standardized little box with a direct link in it: {{my stories}}. Bryan 22:44, 18 January 2008 (EST)