How to Use This Blog

Page Layout

Think of this site or blog like an online, interactive magazine or newspaper. What changes most often on this site are the articles: new ones get published here by Lionel and Brian on various topics. On the home page, and most other pages, these articles are shown from the newest to the oldest. A later section of this article will go into detail on posts, or articles.

Columns or Sidebars

You can also see columns, or sidebars, on one or both sides of the center area where posts are displayed. The left column is shown on all pages, giving you valuable resources, ways to help you find posts on what you are looking for (tags and categories), what others are clicking and their comments, and to subscribe to updates to this site.  The right sidebar shows breaking news (click on the news link to get full details) and where the broad market indexes are right now (hover over the index change to see a historical graph). 

The column layout changes depending on what part of this site you are looking at.  So don’t be surprised if sometimes you see a right and left column, and other times you just see a left column. We do that on purpose so you can more easily read the articles.

Page Header

The top of each page, or header can also help you. First, the tabs at the top are your way to get to the information other than posts (static pages). These give you information on trading, etc. that does not change often, unlike posts which are more like newspaper articles. You can also view the Site Index to see an alphabetical list of all pages and posts.

The upper right of the header has three ways to stay in touch, and a search box. Just type what you are looking for into the search box and it will find relevant articles. (For power search users: in the search box you can also use wild cards like trad* to find any item that has a word that starts with trad, +term to require the term to be present, and -term to require the term to NOT be in the item. You can also enclose a search phrase in single quotes for an exact match, like ’stock trading’.)

Posts or Articles

First, let’s look at how an article or post is presented. Remember, posts are the primary content of this site so it is a good idea to know how to get the most out of them. The part of a post that usually jumps right out at you is the title. It is in large and in dark green. The title is like a magazine title.

By Line

Below the title is the By Line, just like magazine or newspaper articles. The By Line tells you who published the article (usually Lionel or Brian), when it was posted and what categories it is related to.

We use about six categories and every post is put into at least one of them. The “Uncategorized” category is what we use when we don’t know where else to put it You can click on the Category name to get all posts in that Category.

By the way, you can find posts organized by Category list on the left sidebar. If you click on one of the Categories there, all posts that have been assigned to that Category will be shown to you. I should mention that pages like this (the ones you got to from the tabs in the header) don’t have Categories. I don’t know why, but that is just the way it is. So when you click on a Category, you will only get posts, not pages. One category I want to point out is the “Site Usage” category. That is the category where posts are put that help you use this site better.

Tags

That is enough about the By Line. But before we move further down in the format of a post, let’s look above the post title. That is usually where the Tags are listed (sometimes they are at the bottom of the post). What is a Tag? A Tag is like a search engine keyword: one or more topics or concepts that the post is about. Just like Categories, you can click on a Tag to see all the posts that relate to that topic.

Also, the left sidebar has a Tag Cloud, called “Tags”. The Tag Cloud is like the Categories section, but with a few differences. One difference is if you click on a Tag in the left sidebar you will get a list of all posts related to that Tag. One difference is that the size of the Tag name depends on how many posts are assigned to that Tag: so the bigger the Tag, the more popular it is.

The other difference is something that is different than most other blogs’ Tag Cloud. Most blogs show the same Tag Cloud on every page. Our Tag Cloud changes the Tags shown on different pages you are looking at. On the home page, our Tag Cloud is like all others: all Tags are shown. But let’s say you click on a Category name and get a list of posts for that Category. The Tag Cloud on the left will be the Tags that relate to the posts in the Category you are viewing. The same applies to search results, pages like this, etc. So it is a way to filter posts within whatever way you are looking at posts already, instead of always just ignoring the filtering you have already done. Whew! That sounds really complicated. Just try it out and I think you will like it.

Body of the Post

The main part of the post is the body of the post: the contents of the article. One thing to look out for are links within the post body. They look like this. Clicking on those will take you to another web site page. We sometimes use them to refer to a Wikipedia entry to explain a word. Other times we use them to help take you to another useful page.

Some posts will have files attached to them. You can download them to your computer by clicking on them.

Related Posts

At the bottom of the body of most pages is a list of related posts. These are posts or pages that are somehow similar to what the post is about. If you like the current post, you may want to click on the related posts for similar information.

Footer

Lastly, each post has a footer.  There is a lot of stuff in the footer so I’ll walk through it one at a time. The left-most part of the footer relates to the comments on the post. Comments are discussed more in the next section. The footer tells you how many comments are on the post and invites you to join in to the conversation. Please do, we love hearing your comments!

Next is the print icon Use this to print a really nice, usable version of the post. Using your browser’s Print function will print something really ugly instead.

After that are icons that give many ways for you to share the post with others. There is a section later to go over these. Remember, sharing brings good karma

Participating in the Conversation

As you are reading posts and pages, please participate in the conversation. Ask your questions. Give us your opinions. We all benefit from your perspective. And others may have your same questions but are too shy to ask. You can easily participate using comments.  When you leave a comment, be sure to check the box that says “Notify me via email of followup comments”. That way you will get emails whenever someone else posts comments to the same post.

There may be a delay after you post your comment before it is available to view. We sometimes review comments to make sure they are not spam. Sorry for the inconvenience but you might be surprised at how many people try to sabotage blogs with automated spam robots.

Also, you can ask us questions not related to one of our posts. That is a free and easy way to get answers to your stock market trading questions. Others will see your question and our answers. This will also help them too. Get details on how to do this at our FAQ.

We also give you a way to directly interact with us and other people interested in stock trading at our free Stock Trading Discussion Forum. When you go there, get a free userid by clicking on the “Register” button near the top. Doing that will enable you to post messages to the forum.

Please remember it is easy to stay up-to-date with this blog by getting posts sent to your email or with an RSS feed.

Sharing What You Find Here With Others

The last part of the footer helps you share the post with others. You can email the post to your friends by clicking on the “Email This”  link. You can also send the post to any of your social networks using the icons after  “Share with:” . If you want us to support a network that you like but is not here, drop us a request using the Contact Us form on the left. We will try to add support for it.

Tags: FAQ

|  Email This | Share with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•