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

I have read all the questions, answers and instructions now and after painstakingly converting my Entry from Plain Text to GuideML nothing worked and it was full of shocking red error error error stuff.

There must be one tiny thing I am doing wrong, that is obvious to all people who converse daily in HTML but not to me who only has the tiniest inkling of it. I am prepared to learn and am still - just about - convinced that I am not stupid.

I kept it simple, started with , went on with ... ,,,, and closed everything in the correct order at the end(s). I tried a footnote, but that didn't work either.

I have been visiting this site every day since May, but have not dared to write an Entry yet. Now I know why.

You know, you can still write an entry using regular text. You just miss out on the nifty headers, and can't include pictures with the entry.

If you are getting the red error messages, the problem is very likely a simple type.

Most often these come in the tags. You might have left out a slash on the closing , for instance. Or you might have included a tag at the end of the entry (or the end of one section in your entry) without closing it properly. It's really a pain, but you have to doublecheck your code. Even the smallest typo will confuse h2g2.

Let me know if you check carefully over your code and can't find the culprit.

I gave up in the end and have done it in HTML for the moment. I had already checked everything before writing before. And I checked again afterwards.

While fiddling around with it, somewhere in the "Clinic" or somewhere else I noticed you could view other pages which were successfully displayed by adding "test" or something to the URL. I can't find that now, which is annoying, although I have spent three days looking for it. I have tried a few variations on what I thought it said, but they don't work.

I'm not going to be beaten. I'm only asking for simple things, after all, no images, nothing moving, only text with footnotes and lists and headings.

I want to help you find the code, but I'm not quite sure what you are looking for. Are you looking for something to add to the url which will let you view the code, or view pages you ordinarily couldn't because there is a problem with the code? I'm confused.

For a guide entry, you replace the 'A' with 'test' and this allows you to see the code that they used to create the page.

So for http://www.h2g2.com/A344756
you use http://www.h2g2.com/test344756

This will give you an 'analysing page' with the window to see the code used. Note that it may add a couple of things that you don't put in your page, so ignore:

title of article

at the top, and

at the bottom.

Note that this only works for A pages and not U pages. If you want to do this for someone's home page, go to their page and look for a guide entry that has the same title as their home page. This will be the A version of their U page. Use that one to analyse the code.

Hope this helps.

BTW, the most common errors I make in GuideML are:
-- Missing a paragraph tag, or accidentally using instead of to close the tag.
-- Replacing all the text by pasting from my word processor when the page has already been set to GuideML and forgetting the ..... tags. (usually get strange error messages).
-- Using the & symbol.
-- forgetting the last quote mark (eg. ALIGN="CENTER> )

Wow thanks - just what I wanted to know. I'll try it out tomorrow.

To look at the contents of a user page
eg http:/www.h2g2.com/U25551 you can use http:/www.h2g2.com/testuserpage25551

Other than the common problems listed by others above another is not selecting GuideML & hitting "Change entry type" whilst editing the page.

If you want to give an example of a GuideML page that's giving you problems I'm sure someone will be able to spot the error

;^)#