Writing for the Peninsular is open to anyone with an idea for a story, and your story can be a review, it can be news, thoughts, ideas, comments, poetry or prose, it's up to you. Our philosophy is that it will all sort itself out in the long run and we're mostly interested to see what happens when people tell their own stories.

But the technology, now that's a different issue. Authoring webpages frightens most people because they just don't want to get it wrong, and if you've ever tried to make a webpage, you know what can happen if you forget to close an emphasis tag or leave off the end of a table column. It's not a pretty sight.

welcome to Textile

Textile is Dean Allen's simple text-to-HTML converter, and by using Textile on all our stories, the Peninsular avoids the techie HTML issue entirely. Textile uses a common set of formatting rules that are natural and easy to remember, and best of all, harmless.

We know most of these codes already, we use them all the time in our email messages. For example, an underscore before or after a word is emphasis and two underscores before and after do the underlined.

• an asterix in the first column is a bullet point
• with the bullet text on the rest of the line

You can also do super and sub script, strikeout and inserts, teletype, citation and strong text.

1. number signs (pound) do numbered lists
2. and again, the text on the rest of the line

Images are included by placing the URL to the image between exclamation points hotlinks are quoted text followed immediately by a colon and the URL.

It's not perfect, and there are flaws. For one thing, it's not entirely obvious how you would make an image into a hotlink or make a link in strong type. But it's a start and as Textile improves, we'll add the new features to the Peninsular.

The Textile Sandbox

Rather than my going on and on about what Textile does and how it works, if you know a little HTML, you can play with it at Dean's very thoughtful Textile Sandbox The Sandbox lets you enter Textile and see in an instant how these codes translate; with a bit of practice, you'll find it's way easer than learning to code directly in the HTML.

Got Questions on Contributing to the Peninsular?

Post them here!