Good Morning……

I am working on another story but it will be quite lengthy. Maybe ready in a week or so. It will be a combination of photos and text, in short paragraphs and to the point.

The main article will have 66 photos, followed by an “album only” of 30 photos.

So my question to the FTE group is would you rather see it:


A. Broke into 4 parts. Easy to follow

or

B. Continuous. With adequate spacing


My initial thought is that with written into Parts (1,2,3,4) it would be easy for the reader to break away from, and then come back.

Or, for the reader who gets part way into Part 1 and says “you know, this really doesn’t interest me”, they can easily break away from the thread.

The topic will mainly be directed at my 2002, but will be applicable to the 1999-2016 bed and cab style. I really don’t see any similar posts and this is written from the viewpoint of someone who found themselves in new territory (again).

And yet I know there are many experienced on the subject.

Thank you Gents! Best regards - Glenn

 

B. So it’s easy to follow lol

 

As long as there are no YouTube University links in it, I'll read it.

 

All in one post in one giant run-on sentence, then all photos together with no context.

I keed I keed. Option B.

 

B:

I'm not good at trying to find separate threads.

however, please put some White Spacing between the photos,
it is near impossible to determine where on pix ends,
and another pix starts,
if the backgrounds are similar.

and, stick to one format of TEXT above the pix,
or below the pix.... with 3 White lines to the next pix/text.

 

I’ll be the oddball. I would choose A.
4 individual consecutive posts in the same thread.

Sometimes the site gets wiggy and jumps all over the place. This would break it up to hopefully help prevent that and also give someone a stopping point if they want to read it in sections.

When I’ve done this I pop in some “placeholder” posts that I can go back and edit with the rest of the story. This keeps the thread from getting out of order if people start replying before I can finish them all.

 

Option C: Write a book about it, publish it. People need to read more books anyway. Plus if the page jumps it’s not a software glitch.

Sorry guys. I’m in a weird headspace today

 

Thanks guys…. I like what RacinJason said….. I probably didn’t describe it well in my OP….. which is why my Son is an English Lit Major and I’m not


So…..yeah the best of both worlds….continuous but with (Parts) included in the thread acting as book marks - easy to remember where one left off.

I agree about the save and edit too, how many times on forums I was almost done and before I could hit “save”…… poof- it was gone

 

D: Craft your post in Word or another word processor and copy and paste it in 4 or 5 various posts. I know for a fact that FTE used to (maybe still does) get buggy when posting a lot of characters and or attachments/images.

Just be ready to post them one right after the other, so that it will read as one continuous post instead of 4 or 5.

Then the people that want it broken up can have it and the people that one long post can have it too as there will be only a small break with a header and what not. The subsequent post will be directly below the previous...

Also, your editing, linking and uploading will not bug out and go off into the aether after you painstakingly attempted to share a story with us.

 

I agree with writing it up a word processor first,
that way you get Spell Check, and can review the text over the next day or ten.

linking to photos off site, is buggy, doesn't always work right.

LibreOffice Word is a great word processor, it works in any OS the world over, and is more stable than MS's office junk.

 

Yes, I forgot about that one. That’s a huge point!

I agree with Sous. Type it up in something else first so you can just copy/paste. That prevents the frustration of losing a bunch of work within the website.

 

@Big Horn 2

If you want to preserve the first 5 posts of a new thread, so that no one logs a comment between your posts, which would interrupt the flow of your story, if you intended to tell the story over multiple separate posts in sequence, then you can create a series of posts with nothing in them, one after the other, and call them "Placeholders". (How's that for a run on sentence?)

Since the word "Placeholder" can be quickly repasted in subsequent posts, you should be able to commandeer your new thread by copy pasting a one word conversation with yourself sequentially 5 times in a row, which would preserve your priority in the date and time ordering of a thread, no matter what kind of flippant headspace @FordTruckNoob might find himself in.

Then, you may circle back and edit each Placeholder post with another installment of your story.

Still, Sous's idea is best, in that you will want to craft your entire story offline, and not be at the mercy of a glitch in the matrix losing all of your formatting work. Then when you are done, you can copy past your pre-prepared elements into a post, until running out of character allowance, or until arriving at a natural stopping point where you want to artificially impose a break.

Then move to your next Placeholder post and pick up where you left off.

If you later find that you made too many Placeholder posts, just tag me and I'll make them disappear as you direct.

 

Challenge accepted.

 

the Placeholder idea is Top Notch.

now you can cut, paste from your Word Document and place photos at exactly the right position.

 

Yes it is, I appreciate Y2KW57’s feedback.

My concern is the story is becoming too long, so I’m thinking the placemark option would be best.

I’m also trying to be brief, and at the same time include details that are not obvious to the reader…….

sometimes when I write a post it seems so clear to me - but maybe not to the reader because I was the one involved and everything is fresh in my mind………as to the steps I took, whether that was relayed in the story or not.

I'm trying to correct that by using a different perspective I guess we’ll see