h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Shakespeare's Birthday - A87792079
Author: pebblederook-makes idiocy appear simple - U14291825

So far so good, as the man said as he fell past the fourth floor window of the skyscraper.

Hi pebblederook. Welcome to Peer Review. I see you want advice on how to put links at the bottom of your Entry.

My first advice is: don't worry about it. When this is picked, the sub-editor will change these to links.

My second advice is that lots of people are going to try and fail to explain to you how to do them. Be patient and read this.

If you really want to put them in yourself, you're going to have read a little bit about our wonderful h2g2 site.

h2g2 was created long ago and for many years used a system called "Ripley". Ripley had the ability to display pages in a few different styles, which are known as "skins". The main ones of these are "Classic" which is also known as "Goo", and is basically white text on a dark blue background; "Alabaster" which is black on white with lots of cyan and orange bits; and "Brunel" which is black on white with various strongly coloured blocks around the sides. All of these "skins" worked perfectly, although they were old-fashioned-looking.

The BBC, who owned the site, decided that a new look was needed so they paid for a new version to be created, which doesn't use Ripley. Unfortunately it was full of bugs. A few days after it was released, the BBC decided for unrelated reasons, to sell the site.

The new owners got the old, working Ripley skins, and most of us veterans continue to use one of these. They also got the new system which looks a lot better - our technical people fixed it up and made it presentable. It's called Pliny and it is the view of h2g2 that new users see, with black text on white, and lots of blue around the place. Unfortunately, Pliny has still got quite a few bugs in it which the technical people were not able to fix, and one area that is particularly bad is the editor, for you to change your entry. So you're going to have problems if you try and put those links in.

What you really need to do is to change to one of the older skins and do your editing there.

Equally unfortunately, another major bug in Pliny is the way it handles links in conversations - if I give you a link to switch you into, say, the Brunel skin, it almost definitely will misfire. I'll try and explain it in steps.

If you click here: A87792079 you should be brought to your entry.

At the top of your screen, in your address bar, you should see something like this:

h2g2.com/entry/A87792079

Take out that word "entry" and replace it with dna/h2g2/brunel

so that it looks like this:

h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/brunel/A87792079

If there's a www in front of it, that's OK.

If you then go to this address by pressing Enter, you should be shifted into the Brunel skin, and it should display your entry. You'll then be free to edit the entry in any way you like.

If you've succeeded in shifting into Brunel, let me know and I'll start trying to explain how to put in the links.

You've researched this well and written it in an academic style, and I see nothing wrong with it except that it doesn't excite me. Why should it matter to anyone on which day Shakespeare was born? There are greater conspiracy theories out there about whether he wrote those great works attributed to him, and that's of far greater importance (although I'm yet to see any compelling argument that he didn't write them).

If it's to do with April 23rd, then I should probably declare that I'm not a fan of St George's Day. That saint's got about as much to do with England as a myth-associated foreigner who never visited England and never spoke English (which indeed he was). But I digress.

All of this is immaterial, though. I see no reason why we can't publish this.

Icy

Grateful thanks Icy North for your positive comments. As for your problem as to lack of excitement on this subject I can feel your pain. Hopefully I will take heart from the generally positive feedback and come back with something a little more interesting although I will expect a disclaimer fom you of any responsibility if the result of reading my next submission causes you any negative effects. I will take up the challenge of who wrote the works of William Shakespeare if that is necessary.

To Gnomon - my, that lunch tastes good

Thank you. Your response is both informative and also in the true tradition of Douglas Adams tells me both how to do it and the that it actually doesn't mean dingoes kidneys if I don't.

There is a simple way to change to the 'old' skins, and that is to click on preferences, and change the part that says 'skin' to Brunel or Alabaster ( both are fine for editing in)

Then press [update] and bob's your uncle. You will have to do this each time you log out, but shout out if you need more help.

This Entry was well-received in the Edited Guide Workshop. Personally I can see lots of people wanting to read this. I like your simple sentence introduction:

Shakespeare was born on Sunday 23rd of April 1564. Or was he?

a nit pick would be to take out the [of]

The next bit of advice would be to try and break you text up into sections, and give each section a [header] Rather than try to get held up with learning h2g2's GuideML, I would much rather you just put your headings in capital letters where you plan them to be and a sub editor can finish things off for you.

Anyway, good luck with this - keep hanging on!

Welcome pebblederook

Good to see you in Peer Review!

With over 10,000 Entries in the guide, it is not a requirement that every researcher is enthralled by every entry. This is an excellent subject. If you look at some of my work you will find that I write about history quite a bit myself. Just a thought or two, it's your entry so you get to decide what to include

It might be worth mentioning that he was born fairly early in the reign of Elisabeth I and died under King James I (for those with a hazy memory for dates)

As Lanza said, a few headers might help people keep track of where they are in reading.

All in all well done I look forward to seeing this on the Front Page.

If you want to look at some of the other 'skins' I have links on my PS, just before I start boring everyone about what I've written.

F S

*giggles*

"...and died under King James 1"


Sowweee, FS .... That tickled my funny bone!


Pebblederook:

Baby steps will get you there. Don't worry


lil x

Notes applied, aren't I clever. Haven't looked at headings yet. I feel that this piece is too short for headings but that may be because I have just finished reading Ulysses, Bleak House, and War and Peace. Everything is relative I guess except if they are just in laws.

Please reconsider the Headings idea. It will open up the Entry and draw eyes to your work


lil

Lil I was just trying not to repeat the word reign, I am not as familiar of the terms for the time of a monarch's rule as I might like to be.

I did not mean to imply that he was executed, or involved in unnatural acts. (Catherine the Great comes to mind)

Back to the topic



F S

My mind often goes blank when trying to think of a synonym, so I use this site quite a lot when subbing.

http://thesaurus.com/browse/reign?s=t

It will also help google find your Entry if you use a variety of words that mean the same thing, because of the wide variety of ways that people search. Also, it gives the reader a better experience if the writing is not too repetitive and cumbersome,

In this case the subject is about [Shakespeare + Birthday + When] and pebblederook has a heap of good ways to talk about the event, birth, day he was born, baptism etc etc.

If you want to take this further you could look at the types of searches most common which are:

when was shakespeare born and when did he die
when did shakespeare die
when was shakespeare born and who was queen at that time
shakespeare facts
how many plays did shakespeare write
shakespeare plays
when was shakespeare born and when did shakespeare die
how many brothers and sisters shakespeare have

You can see Florida Sailor has also thought about which Monarch was on the throne at the time...

You might also take Icy's point, which was to snare the casual reader by thinking like a copywriter, and introduce the concept of mystery and intrigue. Listen to the way news stories are announced at the top of the show, or that documentaries are flagged before they are aired. They give you a tasty nugget of what is to come. A come and buy hook.

eg after your sentence:

>>> Many books and pamphlets confidently assert the 23rd of April as a fact but in reality no one knows the actual birth date.

You could put something on the lines of
There's a mystery surrounding the date that Shakespeare drew his first breath, we try to lift the veil of this controversy.




I sort of strayed back *on* topic there...

I have another, much longer, piece in the alt writing review, in which I have introduced myself to the concept of subheaders.

However that item is a more relaxed and irreverent look at the Shakespeare conspiracy and I am happy with the sub header idea for that.

This piece is not exactly groundbreaking research, it is well known in the Elizabethan Renaissance drama obsessed world that I inhabit and trying to turn it into a Sun newspaper exclusive (would I be allowed a picture of a naked lady wearing only a quill and holding a strategically but suggestively placed skull?) would make me uneasy.

I will give the subs a whirl however. I am not immovable to public opinion

Trying to attract Daily Fail readers would be taking my meaning just a tad too far pebblederook!

I always like the fact that Shakespeare died on the same date as Cervantes, even though Cervantes died more than a week earlier than Shakespeare. Nothing to do with the entry pebblederook, and I'm sure you're well aware of it, but I thought I'd throw it in anyway.

Yeah, I thought of Cervantes when I read this, too. But getting started on the Gregorian Calendar again might do us all in...I remember the confusion when I did the Phantom Time Hypothesis...

Nice entry here.

Wonderful stuff pebblederook, congratulations on your very first entry about to feature in the Guide!

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