Little Green Footballs Dictionary

Starting now, the LGF Dictionary “administrators” can begin editing the dictionary!

Before you get going, IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU READ ALL of these ground rules, notes and suggestions:

1. HOW TO EDIT: Once you’ve logged in under your username, click on “Site Admin” in the sidebar, then click on the “Manage” tab, then the “Pages” tab, then on the “Edit” link for “LGF Dictionary.” (Or, more conveniently, go to that page directly by clicking here):

Dictionary editing page.

You will see there a scrollable window with the underlying code for the dictionary in it. You can either type directly in this window, or “copy” the portion you wish to edit, paste into a word-processing document of some kind, edit it, and then paste it back in to the dictionary window. (The second method is preferred in case two different people are editing the dictionary at the same moment; if your changes get lost in the shuffle, you can simply re-paste them in from your saved offline document.)

Then click the “Save and Continue editing” button, to save your changes.
Then click the “View” link to see that your changes appear properly. If they do…
Click the “Save” button, and you’re done.

(Yes, this is a little convoluted, but I have no control over how the WordPress system works.)

2. I have just laboriously gone through the entire dictionary and fixed it such that each word can be linked to individually: now, if a word-entry in the list is clicked on, the page jumps to having that word at the top, and the URL in the address bar changes to specifically link to that word on the page. This, hopefully, will make the dictionary much more useful to the general public, as people can provide links to individual definitions, instead of to the dictionary overall.

3. All future new entries in the dictionary should also be linkable like this. So, when creating a new entry, you can simply copy a previous entry and replace all the components with new components. But to make things easier for everyone, newbie and expert alike, I present here the TEMPLATE for all dictionary entries:

<a name=”WORD”><b style=”color: white”>.</b></a><br>
<a href=”#WORD” title=”Direct link to this word”>WORD</a> - DEFINITION.

The only things you need to change in the template are the three instances of the capitalized word “WORD” and the “DEFINITION.”

So, for example, if you wanted to add the new term “jizya,” you would take the code above, and insert “jizya” in the three places where “WORD” is, and then write your definition where “DEFINITION” is.

Thus, to continue the example, the finished code after your inputting, would look like this:

<a name=”jizya”><b style=”color: white”>.</b></a><br>
<a href=”#jizya” title=”Direct link to this word”> jizya</a> - A tax paid by non-Muslims to the Caliph or local Muslim administrators in an Islamic state, as a tribute indicating the infidel’s inferior social status, and as “protection money” to buy the non-Muslim’s safety. Often used sarcastically by LGFers to describe foreign aid payments or court settlements paid to Muslims groups or nations by non-Muslims. “Jizya” is an ancient Arabic term dating back to the time of the Koran.

Which, when pasted into the dictionary, would appear on the page looking like this:

.
jizya - A tax paid by non-Muslims to the Caliph or local Muslim administrators in an Islamic state, as a tribute indicating the infidel’s inferior social status, and as “protection money” to buy the non-Muslim’s safety. Often used sarcastically by LGFers to describe foreign aid payments or court settlements paid to Muslims groups or nations by non-Muslims. “Jizya” is an ancient Arabic term dating back to the time of the Koran.

(The link in the word “jizya” here is correct and functional, but for the moment won’t “work’ because it is not actually in the dictionary quite yet — but you get the point.)

So, everybody: just copy and use the blank template above for creating new words.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Often, terms in the LGF dictionary involve more than one word. If that is the case, in the first two instances of “WORD” in the template, you need to replace the spaces with underscores, because URLs can’t have blank spaces in them. So, for example, in the dictionary is the term “car swarm,” the code for which looks like this:

<a name=”car_swarm”><b style=”color: white”>.</b></a><br>
<a href=”#car_swarm” title=”Direct link to this word”>car swarm</a> - [...definition...]

See the underscores between “car” and “swarm” in the first two instances? (In the third instance, there shouldn’t be an underscore, because that is simply the text that readers will see, not part of the code.)

Also note that the “#” symbol preceding the second “WORD” is not a typo, and is in fact an essential part of the code: please leave the “#” there, as in the examples above.

I hope that is clear! Post a comment on this thread if it is not.

For non-computer-experts: don’t worry what all the little html code doohickeys are for. Just know that they work. If you are curious, ask in a comment and someone will explain.

For the experts: I have purposely made the internal reference tag be a line above the actual word, because it looks really annoying when the word one links to internally on the page is right at the very top edge of the window. But I’ve also discovered that you must link to some actual character (not just a “space” or nothing at all), which is why each entry links to a white “period,” which is my clumsy but functional way of linking to “nothing.”

4. For now, and for the foreseeable future, I would like the dictionary to remain all on one page. A few people have suggested breaking it up so the each entry is its own page, or each letter of the alphabet is it own page, but I think that would really decrease the dictionary’s usefulness factor. This is one point I’m pretty firm about. I’m willing to listen to arguments for breaking up the page, but it’d be pretty hard to sway me.

5. If you want to add or alter a definition to an existing entry, then you can ignore the template and just type in your definition. If you want to add a link within your definition, you can use this html code:

<a href=”INSERTADDRESSHERE” target=”_blank”>INSERTLINKTEXTHERE</a>

That’s about all I can think of at the moment concerning the technical details. If you have question, post a comment on this thread and hopefully someone can answer it.

Next, I will also post a thread about the non-technical stuff (such as how to nominate a new word, and ethics, and so on).

Administrators: Start editing!