Tutorial 9: The Post Queue | ||||||||||||
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Posting Overview
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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. |
Creating Posts |
There are several ways to create new posts:
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. |
Post Queue Cmds |
The following commands are available from the post queue window:
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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:
Text buttons along the bottom of the window provide these functions:
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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.
There are other options available in this cycle gadget for previewing posts. The available settings are:
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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. |
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:
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Summary |
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