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

Hello, welcome to h2g2! My name's Dr E Vibenstein (but you can call me EV, everyone else does). I'm one of the Assistant Community Editors, so if you need any advice on anything h2g2 related, feel free to ask!

If you want to know more about what you can do now you're an h2g2 researcher, have a look at the <./>Welcome</.> page, or drop by <./>Askh2g2</.> where you can ask all those questions that have been troubling you for ages, and share your knowledge with other researchers. You can also click on the h2g2 logo in the top left corner; this will take you back to the front page, which gets updated daily with all the latest goodies.

From your introduction, it sounds like you could add some valuable contributions to the guide - may I suggest you try searching for some topics that interest you, and if there are no current entries on those topics, you could fill the gap by writing one yourself. If you're interested, check the Writing-Beginners and EditedGuide-Guidelines pages for an idea of what we're looking for.

Any problems, give me a shout! Have fun!

Thanks for the welcome!

Sorry I didn't reply earlier -- the bad thing about h2g2 is that every time I try to accomplish the mundane tasks of answering mail or learning GuideML, I get distracted by interesting conversations, links, articles, et cetera. Then I spend the next 5 hours following links and references until it's way past time for me to go to bed.

I've never messed with HTML or XML, but I read all the relevant pages on your GuideML and printed them out for further study. It doesn't look too incredibly difficult. Are there any text examples of an entire average entry with the GuideML tags? That would be useful for me. More along the lines of how I learn.

Is it a horrible faux pas to make longish posts in conversations? I keep trying to be succinct, but end up with way too many things I want to say. I'm also worried about sounding like a know-it-all, but hopefully that's a character flaw of mine that will be a bit more accepted here than in real life. Heh.

At any rate, I totally appreciate the welcome and am really excited about participating here. I'm a fiend for learning, but haven't the discipline or focus for college (thankfully I found that out on a grant, so I'm ahead of most of my friends who discovered that with college loans avalanching all over them), and this seems like just the thing to satiate my scholarly urges without bankrupting me.

Is there any way that I can warn others of my tendancy to run-on sentences and numerous parenthetical asides?

Toodles,
Pb

Hello again! Just to take your points in order...

" the bad thing about h2g2 is that... I get distracted..."

Actually that's one of the good things about h2g2.

"Are there any text examples of an entire average entry with the GuideML tags?"

Not really... I assume you've visited the <./>GuideML-Clinic</.> and seen all the examples there. There is a sneaky tip which I probably shouldn't tell you, but I will - if you want to see the GuideML code behind any particular entry, you can go to the address bar and replace the "A" in the article number with the word "test" - e.g. to see the code behind http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A12345, change the address to http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/test12345.

"Is it a horrible faux pas to make longish posts in conversations?"

Not at all! One of the (other) good things about h2g2 is that it covers all bases, so you could have a very serious, detailed conversation going on somewhere, while simultaneously taking part in a jokey conversation somewhere else.

"Is there any way that I can warn others of my tendancy to run-on sentences and numerous parenthetical asides?"

Well, I would imagine that the introduction on your personal space would be the place to mention this... but I wouldn't worry, we get all sorts in here.

Hope this helps!

I've been working like a dog lately (don't understand that, they mostly sleep and eat) and haven't had much recreational 'puter time, but tonight I tried your little hint .

That's perfect! It's exactly what I needed for how I learn. It seems much easier than I thought it might be. I think I'm going to start working up a draft for my first entry, a piece on herbal medicine (no recipes, just pros, cons and cautions). Gonna do me some stat-finding and brainstorming and hope to have something put together soon.

Wish me luck!

Sounds great - good luck!