Writing a page in MyCA

There are various links for creating a page in MyCA, whether it be a classified ad, a Cruising Information Report (CIR), a Section page or part of your personal log. We will describe here the steps that are common to most of these and you will need to adapt them slightly to different circumstances.

The most general way to start is to click on Add Information in the left hand column and choose one of the formats that appears below it. We will take a Classified Ad as an example. When you click on this you will get a page that, after some introductory text looks like the picture below:

There are three boxes initially that must be filled in followed by a bigger box which contains the substance, or body, of the advert. The three boxes are:

1. The title of the page, which must be filled in.
2. The choice of "Visible by". Many page can be limited to Members only or Public Access, which means anyone on the web. The choice is yours. Click on the arrow at the right hand side and select the option which is appropriate.
3. There is a third box here for Advertisement Category, which is another pull-down box to help people focus in on the ads they are interested in.

Then comes the main body of the page, which uses a simple editor which allows you to set different styles of text and to add pictures. You can either type straight into this box or you can prepare the page on your normal word processor (e.g. Word) and paste it in. However in this last case you should note that some choices of styles will be overriden by the "house style" of MyCA, even when they appear in the box. (See below for information about Previewing the page.)

The general approach is to type in the simple text, then select the text that you want to change the style of and click on the appropriate button above. Thus the first button (B) makes the text bold, the second (I) italic and so on. The conventional keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-B and Ctrl-I) also work in these cases.

The next group of buttons: control the layout of paragraph, allowing left, centred, right and justified text. The next two are for lists, with bullets and numbers and the final two allow one to unindent or indent the paragraph.

You will notice that the unindent option above is "greyed out" because initially you can't unindent a paragraph that isn't indented. Several of the following buttons are greyed out until it is possible to use them, for instance by selecting some text.

The next buttons are for undo and redo. If you make a mistake while you are editing, hitting the first will undo what you've recently done. You can hit it more than once and if you do it too many times you may need to hit the redo button to undo the undo. (Again the conventional Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y shortcuts apply.)

There are many more advanced options which will be considered in the next page, but we've done enough of the basic options and need to consider the crucial aspects of saving and presenting your page on MyCA. Down below the box where you have been entering your text are some more boxes, which will again depend on what type of information you are entering, but in the case of an ad are as follows:

You will notice that the first two boxes have been prefilled, which happens sometimes, though you can change the contents. We would remark that in the case of emails there is protection built-in against "spammers", always a problem with putting email addresses on the web. Below that is a small arrow with the word File Attachments. This conceals another group of boxes which we will consider on the next page. But it's worth noting the format which is used frequently for groups particularly in long forms which would get very hard to read if they were presented all at once.

The final button, Preview, sets in motion the saving process. As it suggests, it doesn't do the save itself, but what it does do is to present a preview of the page as it will appear when it is saved. This comes in three parts:

1. Preview trimmed version. If the page is more than a few lines long it will usually be presented as a "teaser" initially with a "read more" link below it. This shows you what it looks like.
2. Preview full version. The full page (though without showing the file attachment boxes if any).
3. Another copy of the editing page that you had before. This allows you to make any changes you need in the light of the preview. You can go through this edit cycle as many times as necessary.

At the bottom there is a Submit button alongside another Preview button. When you are satisfied with your page, don't forget to press this!

You have now created a new page which will find its proper place. It may appear on the front page but will also be accessible from one of the menus on the left hand side.

Deleting and changing pages

You always have permission to change or delete any page you have created. First of all you need to open the full page (not just the teaser). At this point you should see an "Edit" tab above the content. When you click on this you will be in edit mode, just as you were when creating the page.

To delete the page you will find a button called "Delete" at the bottom of the page. This will do its job after checking you really mean it. It is verydifficult to recover a page after it's been deleted.