You're sitting in front of your computer one morning, reading the latest news at Lucianne.com as you have your first cup of coffee (or tequila - whichever starts off your day best), and you begin to wonder.  "Where do all these geniuses come from?  How do they know how to put all these interesting articles on the Web, and where did they learn it?"  Well, fellow Ldotter, let me clue you in on a little secret....

    You see, you don't have to be a genius to do this stuff.  It's pretty simple, and by the time you're through with this little guide, you'll be cranking out articles like Hillary's ghostwriter.  It's just a matter of learning a few basic computer skills, the first and most important of which is "Copy (or Cut) and Paste".

    This is actually very simple.  It's just a matter of moving your mouse pointer to a piece of text on your screen, highlighting it, copying it, and pasting it somewhere else.

Highlighting

    OK.  First, find the word "Total" in the title at the top of this page and move your mouse pointer in front of it, just before the "T".  You'll notice that it turns into something resembling a big skinny "I".  That means you're ready to highlight text.  All you have to do now is click and hold down your left mouse button as you drag the skinny "I" over the word.  As you do this, you'll notice that the word becomes white and surrounded by either blue or black, depending on how you have your system set up.  Either way, you have just successfully highlighted a piece of text.  Not bad!

    But, let's say for some strange reason you didn't really want to highlight that piece of text.  Just click somewhere else on the screen inside the window and it'll go back to normal.  Now you can find some other arbitrary word to highlight for no apparent reason.  And, let's say that word is "Highlighting" at the top of this little section.  Only this time, you're going to do it a little differently.

    Take your mouse pointer and move it to the word, just like before.  But, instead of moving it to the front of the word and doing the old "click and hold" on your left mouse button, simply double-click your left mouse button once you place the skinny "I" in the middle of the word.  BAM!  "Highlighting" is now highlited.  You've come a long way in such a short time.  I'm getting weepy.

    "Now," you may ask, "why on earth would I want to go to the trouble of clicking, holding and dragging when I want to highlight a piece of text, when all I have to do is double click on it?"  Well, if you'll just settle down and be patient, I'll tell you.  And, if you don't get off my back the lesson's over!

Highlighting More than One Word

    OK.  The reason you might want to click, hold, and drag is because sometimes you want to highlight more than one word.  Say, for example, you want to highlight the words "get off my back" in the previous paragraph.  In that case, you just move the skinny "I" thingy just in front of "get", click and hold down your left mouse button, and drag the "I" to the end of the word "back".  See?  It's pretty simple.  (I'm sorry I had to get all huffy with you about in the other paragraph, but I'm having tequila this morning and it makes me a little moody.)

    I should explain that with some software programs, clicking once inside a word will highlight the whole word, and double-clicking will highlight the entire sentence.  But, I'm just giving the basics, and once you get this little part down, you'll figure out how to make this work on your other applications.  However, the click and hold method works in just about any application you'll ever use.  It's important to know that because I'm just about to tell you how to highlight a whole paragraph at Ldot.

Highlighting Whole Paragraphs

    Imagine for a moment that there's an entire paragraph that you would like to highlight for no other reason than you just dig highlighting paragraphs.  Well there's a couple of ways to go about it.  There's the old "click and hold" way, in which you simply move the mouse pointer to the beginning of the paragraph where it turns into the skinny "I" again.  Once you have the "I", click and hold the left button just like before, and instead of moving it from left-to-right over the words, simply drag it downward from the first sentence to the last sentence of the paragraph.  You'll notice that every line becomes highlighted as you pass it, moving downward.  That's a pretty fast way of doing it, but you have to be careful.  Sometimes you can inadvertently highlight the entire page of text, so you have to watch what you're doing.

    The simpler way to do this is to "triple-click" inside whatever paragraph you want to copy.  This will do the same thing as the "click, hold, and drag" method.  However, if you're reading Ldot articles and you want to select a paragraph from someone else's reply for a quote, triple-clicking will highlight the entire reply, rather than a single paragraph.  In this case, you want to use the "click, hold, and drag"  method if there is more than one paragraph in the individual reply.

    Most of the web sites you visit will behave properly when you try these techniques.  Some won't and you'll just have to try combinations, or just get creative.  Other web sites have text that are actually an image and can't be highlighted through regular means.  The only way I've found around this little problem is to look toward the bottom of the page for a link link that says something to the effect of "Printer Friendly Version".  Click on that baby and you've got a plain text page and you can highlight to your heart's content.

Johnny Can't Read, But He Can Highlight Like Nobody's Business!

    Now that you've learned how to highlight, you might want to do a little practicing.  It's not hard, but there's a certain amount of touch required on pages with exceptionally small text.  Sometimes when you try it on a web page, it's starts going all crazy on you and the page wants to scroll down as you drag the skinny "I" down the page.  Don't get frustrated.  Get a hammer and throw it through your monitor screen until it works right.

Copying and Pasting

    (First, I want you to bring up "Notepad".  I'll tell you why later.)

    This is the part that makes putting the text of the articles you find into Lucianne.com's message boards much less tedious and time consuming.  If you've ever sat there, trying to type things verbatim into one of the fields of the "Post" window, and didn't know it could be done another way, you are going to love me (and I'm single, ladies!) for telling you this.

    First of all, you have to highlight the text, and you should be fairly well-versed at that by now.  If not, just keep on trying until you get it down, and then move on.  Sometimes it takes a steady hand, which I don't have at the moment due to the tequila, but that's neither here, nor there.  I'll manage.  This is about you.

    Highlight the words "Copying and Pasting" at the top of this paragraph.  You'll notice that, once you have a piece of text highlighted and you move your mouse pointer over it (without clicking just yet) it's a pointer again, instead of the skinny "I" thingy.  Once you have the pointer positioned over the highlighted text, you'll want to RIGHT-click on it, instead of left-clicking like you did before.  (Left-clicking on it will cause the highlighting to go away,  which will cause you to become frustrated and throw and hammer through your monitor screen, and that gets expensive after a while.)

    When you right-click on the word, a small menu will pop up out of nowhere.  You'll see some choices there, and some won't be available, so they'll be shaded in grey.  However, one choice that will be available will be "Copy".  Move your pointer to it and left-click.  It may take a little practice, but you'll eventually learn when to right-click and when to left-click.  (Just remember to use the right-click button to bring up a menu - called a context menu, as it operates within the context of whatever application you happen to be using at the time.  And, use the left-click button to select items inside the menu.  Right-click = menu.  Left-click = selection.)

    Now, you have the words "Copying and Pasting" copied.  I want you to bring up your Notepad window now.  When you've done that, right-click inside the window to bring up the context menu, where you'll see the "Paste" option.  Again, left-click on "Paste".  You should see the words "Copying and Pasting" appear.  How cool is that?  You've just done your first "Copy and Paste" job, and it's time for another shot of tequila, or whatever your poison is.

    (NOTE:  When you've "copied" a piece of text, nothing really happens to let you know if you've done it properly.  You can find out if it worked by using the clipboard viewer that comes with Windows.  Whatever you copy will appear in the viewer window.  In my case, it's in the "System Tools" menu, under the "Accessories" menu, which in turn is under the "Start" menu.  So, for those who use Windows ME, it goes "Start", "Accessories", "System Tools" and then "Clipboard Viewer".  I don't know for sure where it is on Widows 98, 95, or 3.1, but I have faith that you'll figure it out.  It's not all that important to know, anyway.)

    It's important to remember that your Clipboard (which is what they call the place that holds the text you've copied) can only hold one thing at a time. Whether you've copied a single word, or a whole paragraph, as soon as you try to copy another item, the previous item is gone.  So, do this one step at a time.

    Some people use the words "Cut" and "Copy" interchangeably.  There's a difference between them, though.  When you're taking text from a web page, there's generally no "Cut" option in the context menu.  That's because when you "Cut" text, it's supposed to disappear from the place where it was originally so you can move it from one place to another for editing purposes.  Since there's no need to actually "edit" a page on the Web, you simply "Copy" it.  Basically it's a meaningless distinction, but for the sake of clarity, "Copy and Paste" and "Cut and Paste" are the same thing where the Web is concerned.

Posting...yeah!!!
 

'Dems Da Rules
 

    Now that you've got the "Highlighting" and the "Cut and Paste" things down, it's time to put it into practice.

    Say you're surfing around and you come across an article that you think might be of interest to the billions and billions of Ldotters out there.  In that case, you'll want to post the article.  But, before you go into a frenzy of "Cut and Paste" mayhem, you'll want to make sure that it hasn't been previously posted, and that the article isn't out of date!  Nothing frosts the rumps of the Ldot Staffers like having to remove outdated or repetitive posts.  (Well, almost nothing.  There are other things, but they're spelled out more specifically in the rules.)

    First of all, you'll want to bring up a new window.  To do that, all you have to do is go to the "File" menu on your web browser and go to "New".  This will bring another menu out, which will say "Window".  Select that baby.  When the new window comes up, type Lucianne.com in the address bar, or select it from your drop-down window on your browser...whatever works for you.  It's best to have two windows up, in any case, as it makes the "Copy and Paste" thing a lot faster if you can switch back and forth between windows.

    When Lucianne.com loads, the first thing you want to do is go to the "Search" function, which can be found by clicking on the "Search" link in the Lucianne.com masthead.  You use this to make sure the article isn't already posted.  The best way to go about this is to "Highlight" the title of the article you want to post, then "Copy" it.  Then, switch to the Ldot window and "Paste" the text of the article title into the box on the "Search" window.  From there, you just click the button.  If it doesn't return any matches, you can post.  Post like the wind!  There's probably another Ldotter out there trying to steal your thunder!

Nail it to the Board

    Once you've established that your article is suitable for posting, you can click on the "Post" link in the masthead at the top of the Ldot page.  When that comes up, you'll see a bunch of blank fields, just waiting to have your interesting information pasted into them.  But, what goes where?

    Well, for the most part, they're pretty self-explanatory.  Where it says "Article Title", you'll want to put the title of the article in question in there.  Just switch over to the window that has the article you want to post, "Copy" the headline, switch over to the Ldot "Post" window, and "Paste" it in there.  Then just move on down the page, alternating from one window to the other, putting in what information is called for.

    Sometimes, there won't be an author listed.  Particularly if the article comes from one of the wire services, like Reuters, UPI, or AP.  In that case, you might want to simply type in "Unattributed" or "None Listed" in the "Author" field.

    In some cases, a columnist may be syndicated, which means the writer's work appears in many different publications.  You'll want to note this fact in the "Publication" field, whenever possible.  George Will and William F. Buckley are good examples of this.  Their work often appears in the Sacremento Bee, for instance.  But, they're syndicated through another outfit, which needs to be credited.  You'll want to look all over the page for this information, but it's usually noted at the bottom.  "Copy and Paste" it in there when you find it.  The same goes with the wire services.  If you find a story in the Washington Times, but it turns out that it's off the AP wire, you might want to fill in the "Publication" field by typing in something like "AP via The Washington Times".  It's nice to spread the credit around where it's due.  And, would it kill ya?

    One of the more vexing parts of posting articles has always been the "URL of Source" field.  This is where you begin to love me for my extensive knowledge of cutting and pasting, gals.  Trying to type in all those numbers, letters, slashes and dots is like trying to catch a moth with hotdog tongs.  But, the cool thing is, if you click once in the address bar of the window where your original article is, it becomes highlighted and ready to cut and paste!  No more fumbling about the keyboard, searching for obscure Sanskrit characters!  Now you can get on with your life!

    But, not before putting in the article "Intro".  Usually, all that amounts to is the first paragraph of the article in question.  I've already shown you how to do a whole paragraph.  It should be a breeze, no?  You can click and hold, or triple-click to highlight, right-click to get the menu, left click to select "Copy".  Then switch to the "Post" window, right-click to get the menu again, and left-click to paste!  You're all over it, baby!  It ain't nothin' but a thang!

    From here, it's just a matter of whether or not you want to put any comments in the "Comments" field, which isn't necessary.  I mean, you've done the leg work.  Let everybody else yammer on about it.  And, if some jerk decides to reply with "Who Cares," sleep well with the knowledge that you're not the kind of person who takes the time to click on articles you don't care about, just so you can say you don't care about them!

    Once you've done all this, scroll on down to the bottom of the page and hit the "Post Article" button.  Next thing you know, you're famous and everyone loves you!

Toodles!

    Well, I hope my fellow Ldotters find this somewhat helpful.  If you have any questions you'd like to ask, I can be reached through my Ldotter Profile.  All you have to do is "Copy" and "Paste" MsFalconersCabanaBoy into the "Search" field.  When an article comes up, click on it, then click on my name.  That'll bring up my profile, wherein you'll find my email address.  Just "Copy and Paste" that baby into your email address field, ask away, and send it.

    See you all at Lucianne.com.  Time for another shot!

Regards,
MsFalconersCabanaBoy