eSay: The DIY Consortium


	home \| browse eSays \| user list \| help \| create account \| login

eSay help

eSay: The DIY Consortium is a site on the internet where you can read or write any kind of guide that you want to share with your friends, family, or just the world in general.

Feel free to look around eSay. Everything on this site can be viewed without an account. However, if you want to rate eSays, leave comments on eSays, or even write your own eSay, you should register an account. It's free and will only take a second.

Once you sign up for an account and have logged in, you will have access to all of eSays's features.

BBCode is a special implementation of HTML used on eSay: The DIY Consortium to format the eSays people write. While BBCode itself is similar in style to HTML, tags are enclosed in the square braces "[" and "]" rather than "<" and ">" and it offers greater control over what and how something is displayed.

To make a block of text bold, enclose it in [b] and [/b] tags. For example: [b]hello[/b] will become hello.
To underline text, use the [u] and [/u] tags. For example: [u]text[/u] becomes text.
To italicise text, use the [i] and [/i] tags. For example: [i]awesome[/i] would turn into awesome.

Changing the color of text is achieved by wrapping the text in [color=] and [/color] tags. You can either specify either a recognised color name (eg. red, blue, yellow, etc.) or the hex alternative, eg. #FFFFFF, #000000.
For example, to create red text you could use: [color=red]red text[/color] or [color=#FF0000]red text[/color] and both examples would output red text.
Changing the text size is achieved in a similar way using the [size=]and [/size] tags. The recommended format is a numerical value representing the text size in pixels, starting from 1 (very small) through to 29 (very large).
For example: [size=9]SMALL[/size] will generally be SMALL whereas: [size=24]HUGE![/size] will be HUGE!

Yes, for example you may write: [size=18][color=red][b]BIG RED TEXT BLOCK![/b][/color][/size] and this would output BIG RED TEXT BLOCK!
We don't recommend you output lots of text that looks like this, though, as it gets annoying to read and will discourage people from reading your eSays.
Remember to ensure that tags are closed in the correct order. For example, the following is incorrect: [b][u]this is wrong[/b][/u].

If you want to display a piece of code or anything that requires a fixed width font, you should enclose the text in [code]and [/code] tags.
For example, you can use: [code]echo "This is some code";[/code]. All formatting used within the [code][/code] tags is retained when you later view it.

BCode supports a number of ways of URLs. The first of these uses the [url=] and [/url] tag.
For example, to link to Google you could use: [url=http://www.google.com]Visit Google![/url] This would generate the following link, Visit Google!
If you want the URL itself displayed as the link, you can do this by simply using: [url]http://www.google.com[/url] This would generate the following link: http://www.google.com
You can also wrap URLs around any of the other tags, such as [img][/img], [b][/b]. As with the formatting tags, it is up to you to ensure the correct order is follow by your tags.
For example: [url=http://www.google.com][img]http://www.google.com/intl/en/images/logo.gif[/url][/img] is not correct.

BBCode incorporates a tag for including images in your posts, however the image you are displaying must already be available on the internet.
To display an image, you must surround the URL pointing to the image with [img] and [/img] tags.
For example: [img]http://www.kneejah.com/images/layout/xhtml.png[/img] would generate:
You can also wrap an image in a [url][/url] tag if you wish, making a linked image.
For example: [url=http://www.w3.org][img]http://www.kneejah.com/images/layout/xhtml.png[/img][/url] would generate:

There are already many websites that are designed to host images for use in sites such as eSay: The DIY Consortum, and many of them automatically generate the BBCode you use for you.
ImageShack
PaintedOver
ImageHosting.us

BBCode and these instructions were based on the BBCode found in phpBB's bulletin board software.