Tutorial 9: The Post Queue
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Contents: Posting Overview Creating New Posts Post Queue Cmds
Post Editor Cmds Preview & Post Wrapping Displayable Info
MIME & Non-ASCII Encoding Summary
Posting Overview

Posts in NewsRog are usually created by using commands available in the group reader window. However, they can also be directly created from within the post queue. The post queue holds a list of composed postings that you have created. These posts can be composed on or offline. Once one or more posts have been composed, they can all be sent to the network in a batch mode.

There are two specific post related windows; the Post Queue holds a list of posts being composed that have not yet been sent to the network:

And in the "Send Posts" area, a list of posts that have been sent to the network:

The Post Editor allows you to edit one particular post.

NewsRog allows you to use any text editor that you chose to edit posts, or you can use the builtin text editor shown here. If you are using an external text editor, as soon as that editor saves the file, NewsRog will update it's own display in the post editor window. AmigaOS file notifications are used, so the editor can be run asynchronously and you can save the file from the text editor as many times as you wish before closing the editor. The default external editor is c:ed, but this can be changed in the global configuration options.

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Creating Posts There are several ways to create new posts:

  • Using the Group/Post New... or Viewer Article/Post Followup... menu items in the group window.

  • Dragging an article from the article list in a group window onto the post queue window. This will compose a followup to the article, quoting the original article text.

  • Dragging a group from the group list window onto the post queue window. This will compose a new post to that group.

  • Adding a post manually by using the Add button in the post queue window shown above. In this case you will need to enter both the subject and group information by hand.

Under normal operation using the group reader Followup or Post New commands, the post queue window does not appear. Instead, a post editor for that post appears directly.

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Post Queue Cmds The following commands are available from the post queue window:

  • Add - Adds a new post, with no subject, group, or file contents. This information will need to be supplied by hand.

  • Delete - Deletes the selected (highlighted) posts.

  • Edit - Calls up the post editor for the selected post.

  • Post - Sends the selected (highlighted) posts to the network. This is only available in online mode, and it is a batch operation - all selected posts will be sent. A status window will appear showing the current progress.

  • Select All - Selects all posts in the queue.

  • --> - Transfer the selected posts to the archival ("Send Posts") section of the post editor.

Similar buttons are available in the archive section, except that the Post and Add commands are not available, and the <-- button transfers archived posts back to the post queue.

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Post Editor Cmds The post editor allows you to set basic information about the post, such as the subject, the group(s), the followup line, the distribution list, the sig file that should be appended (if any), and to edit the post's text. If this post was created by following up to another post, a quoted version of the original post will already be inserted.

Text may be typed directly into the post window, and the following buttons may be used to edit the post:

ButtonDescription
A file requester appears and a file may be chosen which will be inserted into the current document at the cursor's location.
The text of the current post will be saved to a chosen file.
The currently selected (highlighted) text will be cut and copied to the system clipboard.
The currently selected (highlighted) text will be copied to the system clipboard, but remains in the document.
Text from the system clipboard will be inserted into the current document at the cursor's location.
The previous change will be undone.
The previously undone change will be re-done.
The currently selected (highlighted) text will be converted to bold, or to normal if it was already bold.
The currently selected (highlighted) text will be converted to italic, or to normal if it was already italic.
The currently selected (highlighted) text will be converted to underlined, or to normal if it was already underlined.

The post editor may be toggled between the "Edit Post" mode, in which the post may be edited, and "View Wrapped" mode, which shows the post wrapped to the number of characters specified in the main configuration window. The post will be wrapped when it is posted, but if you have an external editor such as GNU emacs that performs this function, you may do it there as well.

If this gadget is checked, then any custom headers defined in the main configuration window will be transmitted along with this post when it is sent to the news server. Otherwise, custom headers are ignored.

Text buttons along the bottom of the window provide these functions:

  • Post now - Sends the post in its current form to the network. This is only available in online mode.

  • Invoke Editor - Invokes an external editor to edit the post. Any time the editor saves the file, this view will be instantly updated.

  • To Queue - Closes this window and puts the post in its current form back into the post queue for later editing or batch posting. This can be done in either online or offline mode.

  • Cancel - Cancels all the edits to the post text that were performed since the post editor was opened, and reverts to the previous version.

  • Delete - Deletes this post from the post queue and closes the editor window. This removes the post entirely.

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Preview & Post Wrapping By default, the lines you type into the post editor are not rewrapped until you send the post to the network. You can change this behavior in the the main configuration window, but wrapping lines at the last possible moment has the advantage that if you edit a post multiple times, you don't have to manually adjust the line breaks each time, a problem common to other software.

However, it is desirable to know what your post will look like before sending it to the network. Toggling The Edit Mode button to View Wrapped will let you see the results of line wrapping on your post. It is wise to always double check the formatting of your post before sending it to the network!

There are other options available in this cycle gadget for previewing posts. The available settings are:

  • View Wrapped - As described above, this shows you the post body after line wrapping, as it will be sent to the network.
  • View All - Similar to View Wrapped, but shows the complete set of article headers as well.
  • View Encoding - This shows you the post to be transmitted with any MIME encoding visible. You may see the results of quoted-printable encoding in your message body or article headers if your article contains non-ASCII characters.

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MIME & Non-ASCII Encoding Many aspects of the internet in general, and usenet in particular, were originally developed many years ago before it was common to support characters from languages other than English in computer software. Thus, only 7-bit ASCII data (characters in the range from 0-127) is guaranteed to be transmitted cleanly through usenet and many other internet services.

To address this limitation, the MIME standard specifies a quoted-printable encoding scheme in which non-ASCII characters are translated into a unique sequence of 3 ASCII characters, and the reverse transformation is applied when viewing the article at its destination. This makes it much more likely that the article will be transmitted without loss of non-ASCII characters.

NewsRog will examine your post before sending it to detect whether it contains non-ASCII characters, and if so, it will generate a text/plain MIME document using the quoted-printable encoding scheme. This is only done for documents that contain one or more non-ASCII characters. A great many people read usenet using software that is not able to decode quoted-printable encoding. Quoted-printable encoding is "mostly" human readable, but there are limitations which make it preferable to avoid when possible.

When posting in quoted-printable format, NewsRog will generate "soft" line-breaks for lines who's encoded length exceeds 75 characters, and will encode whitespace at the end of lines, non-ASCII characters, and the ASCII equal ('=') sign using quoted-printable character encoding, which looks like an equals sign followed by two hex digits when viewed without being decoded. For this reason your article may appear less than optimally readable for those using non-MIME aware newsreaders. This is generally perfectly fine for non-English newsgroups where most people are using MIME aware newsreaders, but should be avoided if possible in English language groups.

Note: The presence of non-ASCII characters in a signature file is also sufficient to trigger quoted-printable encoding!

When transmitting a MIME text document, NewsRog will include the value of the charset that you have defined in the main configuration window. This tells software on the reader's computer what codeset your article was created using. Note that the MIME standard requires that only the ISO-8869-X codesets be used for transmitting posts.

You may use the View Encoding preview mode to see the results of quoted-printable encoding if it has been performed on your article.

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Displayable Data The post queue can be set to display any desired information about the posts. (See this tutorial for more information). The following data may be displayed:

Column Description
Lines The number of text lines in the post.
Size The size of the post in Kb or Mb.
Subject The subject field for the post. This will be set automatically when following up to another posting.
Groups The list of groups to which this article should be posted. It is generally best to post to an absolute minimum of applicable groups.

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Summary By this point in the tutorial you should understand:

  • The difference between the post queue window and the post editor window.
  • How to select posts and invoke the post editor.
  • How to change a post's subject, group, body text, and other information.
  • How to followup to another post or create a new post from the group window.
  • How to followup to articles using drag and drop.
  • The difference between single and batch posting.
  • How to delete a posting you don't want.
  • When line wrapping happens, and how to preview your posts before sending them to the network.
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