Re: Musings on the Basics....

[sundialsvc4]

(Shrug...)

I'm not afraid to ask, so I'm willing to help.

About the only “gripe” that I might have is:   please learn about the <readmore> tag! When people post a huge mess of code, especially without that tag, I generally ignore it because “I have plenty of code of my own to debug, thankye very much!” I can't say that I do not sympathize with their frustration, because I certainly do. But I'm also mindful that they are not really approaching this resource in the best way for what they are ultimately trying to achieve.

Generally, when you post something, you should be mindful that the thread will persist for years to come, and it will be found (using a keyword search) thousands of times. Therefore:

• You should take the time to do a search, to see if the question has already been answered, so that you do not create yet-another thread ... and of course, you find your answer right away.
• If you do decide to post another thread, distill it to the shortest amount of material that clearly illustrates the problem.
• Be mindful of the “XY problem”:   asking about X because you right-now think that it's the way to the solution to your real problem, which is Y. Set your inquiry into proper context. You might be frustrated right now because you've been chasing a red herring. Therefore, we don't need to know where the herring is:   we need to know where you were trying to go.
• When you find your answer, be sure to close your thread. Briefly describe what the solution turned out to be, in language that someone who is reading only this post will clearly understand. Also, I think it's a good idea to put SOLVED in the subject-line of the first message in the thread, so that anyone who is trolling for solutions will tend to zero-in on this one.
• With regard to “subject lines,” be sure to make them descriptive, because the most-likely thing that someone who is searching for an answer will do is to do a subject-line search. A search for Help Me! will produce a lot of hits... but no one will take the time to read them.

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Hmmmm, I missed the discussion of the <readmore> tag in the HTML tags section. I'll have to go back through and read up on that. Thanks for the tips, I had never thought about the SOLVED in the subject line. Good advice =)