MOTD

Lolz.

So I'm sitting here watching E wrestle with wikitravel, trying to enter in her own travel story about Krakow. Here's what happens when you think you want to add something to wikitravel:

You start looking for an existing page, and only see big scary CIA documents or big templates with huge requirements and a rigid structure. If you aren't completely scared off at this point, you might notice the Plunge Forward advice, and let that steel your confidence. Maybe you read the Stub Articles page again, and decide to forego the stuffy template this time.

So basically I told E to go to the Poland page, edit the URL, and then "edit this page" from the empty Krakow page. By this time she was super ready to just close the browser and do something more interesting. Now she's busy wrestling with the crack-addled wiki markup (quotation marks for emphasis! Welcome to "the Internet" of hand-lettered business signs!).

It sounds like it's basically all about Mister Bad being unemployed and doing nothing but edit wikitravel articles all day.

Okay, so I was bored, so I went ahead and did a green button. I now find it utterly baffling that this little trick isn't more widespread. I see all these stupid little GIFs for the syndication buttons on all these sites I find.

So the CSS for it is just this:

.button {   background: #ff6600;
    color: white;
    border-left:   1px solid #ff9a57;
    border-top:    1px solid #ffc8a4;
    border-right:  1px solid #7d3302;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #3f1a01;
    padding: 0px 0.5em 0px 0.5em;
    font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
    font-weight: bold;
    font-size: small;
    text-decoration: none; }

Then you make your link <a class="button" href="rss.xml">XML</a> and up comes a little orange button. You can even put all thet style nonsense into the style= attribute of the a tag if you want.

Man, so Paul Gray's crazy CSS is so leet. Did you know that the RSS button on the right is not an image? I made a styleeee so you can make orange buttons with all kinds of text really simply. I'll have to work out other colors at some point, I think.