Diaspora/Website

Above the publisher window you’ll see two tabs and a row of buttons. The tabs display your raw message text and a preview of how your finished message will look. The buttons are there to help you format your text and add other things to your message:

Bold

Italic

Heading

Link

Image

Bulleted list

Numbered list

Code

Quoted text

Adding a poll

The icon at the bottom right of the publisher that looks like a graph enables you to add a poll to your post. Click it and a box will open into which you can enter a question you want to poll people on, and two or more answers for them to give. Each time you enter an answer in the last field, another will appear below, so you can give as many answer options as you like.

That is all there is to know about the buttons and icons on the publisher. The real magic happens within the publisher itself. As well as plain text, you can format your text, add #tags, @mentions and links, and embed photos, videos and audio. Wow!

There’s a lot you can do to make your text more varied: bold, italics, large headings and so on. Most of this formatting can be done using the buttons above the publisher – you don’t need to worry about that messy code.

To add <em>italic</em>, <strong>bold</strong>, or inline code, highlight the text you want to format and click the relevant button from the row above the publisher window. The Markdown code for this formatting will be placed around this portion of text.

To create a heading, list or quotation, place your cursor on the line you want to format, and press the relevant button.

Want to include a link in your post? Just click the <span class="click">link</span> button and paste the link URL into the pop-up which appears. This will enter the URL into your post, wrapped in Markdown link code. Type the text you want to appear in your message over the highlighted text in square brackets.

If you want to include a bare link into your message, simply paste the URL into the publisher and it will automatically be converted into an inline link. You don’t need to use Markdown unless you want the link to look fancy!

Images

Embedding an image from the web into your message is similar to including a link. Click the <span class="click">image</span> button above the publisher window, and paste the URL of the image into the pop-up which appears.  This will enter the URL into your post, wrapped in Markdown image code. Type some “alt text” (the text you want to appear in your message if the image can’t be displayed) over the highlighted text in square brackets. You can also add an optional title, which will be displayed as a tool-tip when the cursor is moved over the image.