Blog instructions

The front page of the Psi-k website is a user-created ‘magazine’ reflecting the interests of the electronic structure community. Anyone who is interested may use the ‘Subscribe to the Psi-k magazine via email’ box at the bottom of any page on this site to automatically receive notifications of new posts.

Any authorized user can post to it. Sometimes this will be for quasi-official purposes, e.g., submitting a meeting report for a Psi-k-funded workshop, but perhaps the main purpose of the magazine is to entertain and inform (if you simply want to announce something then please use the forum mailing lists). When posting to the front page please therefore bear in mind two somewhat non-standard things. If possible make sure your post looks nice – even beautiful if you can manage it. To this end you should make sure you understand how the formatting tools work — these are explained  below — and you might also consider using nice images or artwork to enhance your post. Secondly, try to make your content of general interest and to write it in such a way that it is  understandable to a wider audience who may not be specialists in your particular field. Finally, make sure you use the ‘Read More’ tag for long posts, and that you assign a ‘Category’ to your post (see below).

People joining the site are assigned particular roles limiting what they can and cannot do.  Administrators and Editors can publish and manage the posts of others, Authors can publish and manage their own posts both in the forum mailing lists and on the front page magazine.  Contributors can post to the mailing lists but not on the front page.  The default status on joining the site is Contributor – though clicking the POST TO FRONT PAGE button will reveal a contact form through which you may request upgrade to Author status.

What can you do?

To create content for the website, you need to click on FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE-->POST TO FRONT PAGE in the left-hand sidebar menu (which may be automatically relocated to bottom the page on narrow screens or mobile devices). If you are of at least Author status, a word processor window will appear allowing you to compose your post (more details below) and when finished you can submit it by pressing the ‘Publish’ button (or ‘Update’ if you are editing a previously published post). After possibly being moderated, your post will appear in the central column of the front page at or near the top. ‘Sticky posts’ that the administrators want the users to see first could appear above yours. As other people make posts later, your post will gradually sink down the list; it will eventually fall off the bottom, but it will be continue to be available in the archives and be accessible in various ways.  As already stated, you can choose to be informed by email of any new posts, should you wish, and people may leave comments for each individual post.

What sort of things should you post?

As this is a general interest magazine, you can post about anything you like that you think may be of interest to an intelligent human being that is part of this community. Note that this is a much wider remit than you might be used to, and is not necessarily limited to density functional theory, etc..

When you write a Post,  it is very important to assign it to a Category by pressing the appropriate button to the right of the writing area. The Category  is currently allowed to be ‘artwork’, ‘books’, ‘events’, ‘music’, ‘papers’, ‘photos’, ‘reports’, ‘videos’ and ‘uncategorized’ (others can be added on request). Visitors to the site may view posts in these categories by pressing the buttons in the right hand sidebar.

You will have noticed there is a right hand column on the front page of the site (the ‘content sidebar’); this is meant to allow magazine-style vignettes of selected posts. You can get a post to appear in the sidebar by assigning it a Format — a closely related but separate concept to Category. Currently formats are ‘Aside’, ‘Image’, ‘Video’, ‘Audio’, ‘Quote’, ‘Link’, and ‘Gallery’ – and examples of most of these may be seen on the main page. These should all be self-explanatory, apart possibly from ‘Aside’ which is supposed to be a brief snippet of text, like a quick thought or an anecdote.. The ‘Gallery’ format is distinguished from ‘Image’ since it’s meant for displays of multiple images using a slider. Note that it should really be the administrators who decide which posts should be highlighted in the sidebar, so regular users might in general like to refrain from using Formats.

How to write

After you have clicked ‘POST TO FRONT PAGE’, you are presented with a large text box accompanied by a word processor with a toolbar above it. You can select text with the mouse then, e.g., make it all italic by pressing the obvious I button in the toolbar. Alternatively you might like to use the standard keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl-I. Press the help button in the toolbar (the grey circle with the question mark) to learn what these ‘Hotkeys’ are. You’ll see there are buttons which allow you to switch between ‘Visual’ and ‘Text’ modes – it’s important to understand the difference. The Text mode allows you to directly input text formatted with HTML tags (most useful if you want to paste HTML directly off some other site); Visual mode is a quasi-accurate rendering of how the page will look in a browser which you can still edit directly. It has a much greater variety of editing buttons in the little toolbar (or at least it does if you press the ‘Toolbar Toggle’ Button on the right – a setting that should be remembered between logins).

You can insert images and photos using the ‘Add Media’ button (it assumes these are stored locally, so you may have to Upload them first and it will give you the option to do that). A particular nice way to display the picture is to set is as a ‘featured image’ using the button on the right-hand sidebar (which makes it look like the picture of the pen at the top of this page; note the overlap with the text).

People with elevated privileges might like to note that documents (highlights, PDF files etc..) are added to the site using the WP-Filebase functionality available in the Dashboard, and not to the standard Media library.

You can write mathematical equations by enclosing regular Latex commands inside latex tags in Text mode, e.g.:

\frac{dE}{d\lambda}=\frac{\partial E} {\partial\lambda}+\sum_{i}\frac{\partial E}{\partial c_{i}}\frac{dc_{i}}{d\lambda}
 

Look at the source code for this page in Text mode to see how that is done.

If your post is more than a couple of paragraphs long,  you should insert a ‘Read More’ tag by pressing the appropriate button on the editing toolbar. This means that – when seen on the front page – your post will be truncated at the point where you inserted the tag and replaced with an instruction to ‘Click here to read more’. It is important to do this so you leave space  on the front page for other peoples’ posts.

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Ab initio (from electronic structure) calculation of complex processes in materials