@anorton: So, our blog is now set up (nominally) - just waiting for content

@anorton: I randomly selected a first post, and you were chosen

what do you think?

@mixedmath Sounds good to me. I'm reading through chatlog now... Should have the post up by tomorrow--midday, or evening at latest.

err... nevermind. Thought I already had contributor-level access.

@anorton great! You should go ahead and click on the link Grace put up so that I can give you permission to draft a post

I clicked.

I should be all set up on my side.

ok, and that's that!

Great! I'll work on getting my post moved over from LaTeX to Markdown.

ah, I have something for that

I have a python script that will transform it for you, if you'd like

That would be awesome.

(I have my own wordpress blog, and I use a script to switch, but now that I think of it we can use the original that I based mine off of) check out latex2wp

which I've used extensively, and so in theory can debug

That worked great for the formatting stuff, I just need to get the TikZ stuff to images now (which I'm probably going to do a clunky way, but I know it'll work...). Thanks for the program! :)

@mixedmath Hmmm.... ok, my "align" environments aren't working exactly right...

(They're not rendering)

@anorton hmm, ok - give me a moment.

click somewhere to "save as a draft"

If it's the same WP Latex support as mentioned here, \begin{align} may not work at all.

@anorton well, that would be disappointing

Ah ha! I was using {align*}, not {align} (to prevent numbering).

Problem appears to be gone now...

nope, I managed to make a test post with align environments (thank goodness) -

ah, good!

Can I "take over" my post for editing, or are you still doing stuff? (I'm getting a warning dialog)

yep - all yours

(sorry)

Ok

@mixedmath I believe I have it in a nice form, but I want to double-check in the morning when I'm more awake. I tagged it with tagnames that correspond with actual MSE tags, using the ones I would have used if it were a question. (I think our "categories" should be used for target audiences (e.g. "undergraduate," "high school," etc.), and our tags should mirror MSE tags.)

I'm headed off for the night, but I'll check back here in the morning, so if you have any comments or problems viewing it, just leave a note. :)

@anorton: great! I'll do that, and good night!

(I see people wandering in here - and we have a blog now!)

@ParamanandSingh: we now have a blog, and we are ready to put your post into the process (which is still new - bear with us)

@MJD @JyrkiLahtonen @vzn @Goos: we now have a blog, and are ready to begin working with the first articles

If you look at the conversation immediately above, you'll see how this starts. First, you go to math.blogoverflow.com/wp-admin

sign in - then you'll see you can't really do much of anything

ping me, and I'll then give you the ability to write an article. Once you can do this, you can upload your drafts

and that's the first step

my plan is to have about 2-3 meaningful posts relatively rapidly at first, followed by a post every other week or so

Submitted my post for review.

I might suggest having a Meta post that just details all of the instructions. However short they may be, it's good to know how the process runs and having a Meta post would be a good way to keep it contained and easy-to-link.

That or a nice image that just has all of it in there.

@mixedmath ok did that

@GraceNote Working on it.

(Just so no one else starts... :) )

@vzn and voila, you have drafting powers!

Gah. I should have looked first. :)

(I'm still putting it all up)

does it make sense?

Looks great thus far... I do have one comment regarding your "tags" post: (typing)

Regarding tags: it looks as WP has "categories," and I was thinking it could be nice to use those (instead of tags) for designating target audience.

(e.g. Category "high-school" instead of tag high-school)

@anorton oh, you're absolutely right - oversight on my part. Would you like to edit that?

Sure.

(I just wanted to make sure someone agreed before I went around editing stuff...)

Hm. I must have mis-read. You have it like I just said, but I'm sure I saw something different. I must be trying to "go too fast." :)

@mixedmath Could we have "Advanced High School" and "Undergraduate" categories? I can't seem to create them--I'm wondering if it's out of my permissions...

@anorton ah, you can

*

whoops, I didn't mean that at all

I meant, ah, you can't create categories: I hadn't thought of that

haha

ok

so what categories do you think we should have?

(Because I find that the sharpest distinction between "advanced" and "normal" students is in High School, I think we need two categories there.)

We could probably also have "Overview" (for posts that describe a general field/branch of math) and "Expository" (for, well, expository posts.)

Ah yes, "All Levels" is an important one, too.

yes, I like that

thx mm posted my draft

I have logged in at math.blogoverflow.com/wp-admin but I don't seem to have permission to post my draft. The instructions at meta.math.stackexchange.com/a/13905/25554 say to ask here for the required permission.

@MJD Yep! and now you have permissions

We don't have categories yet, right? (Just making sure...)

@anorton not yet - many things to do, all at once! In another 5 minutes

Haha, yeah--Take your time.

How do I submit a post that is written in Markdown? It doesn't seem to recognize that my input is in Markdown.

Do I need to convert the Markdown to HTML and paste the HTML?

What exactly is not working? It recognized the "==" headers, * italics, and ` code tags.

(at least, for me)

Ah ha! It seems like markdown doesn't work if you paste into the "Visual" editor, but it does work if you paste into "Text"

I pasted mine into the "text" editor, then switched to "visual" expecting to see it properly rendered, but it isn't. Here is a screenshot:

Oh--it doesn't render in "Visual," but rather when you click the "Preview" button on the right-hand-side.

Aha, clicking the "view post" button renders it.

Should I be concerned that the $...$ escapes are not processed?

@anorton ah, I didn't know that

@MJD tragically, they won't be. Check out this, and don't be too disappointed

in short, use either $latex (stuff)$ or $$ (stuff) $$, and if still nothing renders, then toss in a [mathjax] somewhere on the page

ok, I'm headed out for a bit, and at the moment I'm the only active admin - ping me if something comes up

After 20 minutes of struggling with Wordpress's multiple levels of escaping and encoding, I'm not sure I want to spend much more time trying to make this work.

Well, it seems there's only one remaining broken paragraph.

If I were promoted to Editor, I would be willing to help make posts be formatted correctly.

I'm headed offline for now, though.

And when I put <img src="abc.jpg" alt="..." /> into the text box, and save it, WP helpfully converts it to <a href="abc.jpg" />, just in case maybe I didn't want my image inlined or something.

No, that was my stupidity, not WP's.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to write a mathse2wp script that would take valid input on math.se style markdown and transform it into wp - that should be doable, except for images

I did do that. It's a yucky hack, and doesn't quite always work, but I will share it in a minute.

Otherwise I would have had to maintain corrections in both the WP version and the original Markdown version of the article, which would have been madness.

Here's what I used: github.com/mjdominus/perl-misc/blob/master/mathse2wp.pl

ah, perl.

@MJD: I've quickly went through your proposed post, and made some fairly minor changes. (I changed the heading levels to all be stronger, since some (sub-)section titles were indistinguishable from surrounding text, and the rest of my intentional changes were what I felt were typos. (The system seemed to clear up trailing whitespace by itself.) Feel free to check the diff, and revert whatever you feel was egregious overstepping on my part.

All in all, I feel that your proposed post is ready to go!

Thanks. I was also unhappy with the formatting of the level-4 headers, so I am glad you changed them.

Your changes all look good to me.

The only change of yours that I see that are not purely typographical are the replacement of $a$ and $b$ with $A$ and $B$ in one place, and the removal of [mathjax] at the top of the article.

@MJD I was actually worried that it was a deliberate choice on your part. Glad I did something not-too-terrible.

No, it was an error. Thank you!

@MJD I felt that the a->A and b->B changes were typographical, since you introduced that example (with the capital letters) in the previous paragraph. (The removal of the [mathjax] from the top is due to our setting an option on the site that will automatically load MathJax for all pages, making it (hopefully) unnecessary to include any explicit mention on any post.)

Guess I'll be needing the privilege to post and edit my draft. How to embedd images? I can easily convert all my images from eps to gif, if that helps (my first guess would be that it does help).

@JyrkiLahtonen You should already be set up to create/edit your own drafts. Posting is something that will be left to the admins (that is, for now the math.SE mods) to handle). See mixedmath's answer.

I would imagine that .gif or .png would be preferred image formats. When editing there should be a visible button to "add media", and I am pretty sure that you upload your images using this, and then from the "Media Library" you can insert the images into your drafts/posts.

General question: in what format should submitted articles (for review and editing) be written? Should they be text files, TeX files, word files,...?

@Notnotlogocal You'll have to paste it into a dialog box in WordPress, so it had better be some form of text.

Getting mine converted from math.se-flavored Markdown only cost an hour of my precious remaining life.

@NotNotLogical I'm now 90% sure that a script I have can convert math.se style Markdown to what wordpress needs semi-instantaneously, with the exception of images (which need to be done by hand)

so if you have something that formats well on MSE, it should format well on the blog