Want to start adding your own posts - or "diaries," in SBNation parlance - to Waggle Room? No problem - you're welcome and encouraged to do so. Just create an account and you can get started.

Some simple guidelines:

1. Stay on topic (and our topic, in case you've forgotten, is golf).
2. Keep it clean.
3. No blatant advertising of products or services.
4. A diary post should be a minimum of 300 characters long. If you want to post something that's just a sentence or two in length, post it as a comment, not as a diary.

Formatting Your Diaries

You have the ability to format your diary posts just as posts are formatted on the homepage, using bold, italics, blockquotes, and so on. The form you fill out to add posts defaults to Auto Format. You can choose HTML Formatting if you wish, but all the following commands work in Auto Format, too, so it's easiest just to stick with that.

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

To start a new paragraph, press "Enter" on your keyboard twice. To insert a line break, press "Enter" once. If you see a line of white space between your paragraphs in the editing form, then that's how it will look after publishing, too.

Bold and Italics

If you want to emphasize a word or phrase with boldface type, puts asterisks (*), *like this*, around your words. This causes the text between the asterisks to appear in boldface after publishing. For italics, enter text between underscores (_) or slashes (/), _like this_ /or this/, and those words will appear in italics in your published diary.

Adding Links

If you're writing diary posts on Waggle Room, you'll probably need to include a link now and then. And creating a link is simple: In the Auto Format mode, just type the full URL, including the "http://" part, and the URL will automatically appear as a link upon publishing. For example, if you typed the following text:

This website runs weblog software from http://scoop.kuro5hin.org.

the resulting comment will look like this:

This website runs weblog software from http://scoop.kuro5hin.org .

If you prefer to hyperlink a word or phrase, rather than a URL - for example, if you wanted the text "This search engine" to point to http://www.google.com/, type the following:

<a href="http://www.google.com/" target="_blank">This search engine</a>

Which will render like so:

This search engine

When adding links to your posts, please always use the "target=_blank" attribute, as in the above example. This causes the link to open in a new browser window when clicked, so that readers aren't taken away from Waggle Room.

Making Lists You can create bulleted lists by entering a series of lines starting with an asterisk followed by a space ('* '). Numbered lists can be created similarly, by typing a series of lines beginning with a number follwed by a period ('1. '). For example, typing in the following text:

* Eggs * Bacon * Toast * Hot grits

will give the following result:

• Eggs
• Bacon
• Toast
• Hot grits

Blockquotes "Blockquote" is the term for text that is quoted from another source; this text appears in a gray box so as to stand out, making sure readers recognize it as quoted material. To use a blockquote in your diary post, use this code:

<div class="blockquote">Insert text of the quote here</div>

And it will look like this:

If you quote from an article on another Web site, you should always link back to that article, and if your quote is more than a couple sentences use a blockquote. Remember that most articles are copyrighted, so you should never repost an entire article from another source on Waggle Room. But quoting several paragraphs is fine, so long as you include a link back to the original source.