Contributing

Submitted by Jpfan01, minor additions by Toast

Welcome to the Goons with Spoons Recipe Submission Tutorial!

This page will hopefully help you in the process of submitting your first of many recipes here on the Goons with Spoons wiki.

Creation of Your Guide

The very first thing you will need to do is create a page for your recipe. If you look over to the left, where the menu is, you will see a search bar. When you've decided on what you want to name your recipe as type it into the search bar and press go like this:

If no one has used the same name as you for their recipe, typing your recipe's name into the search bar will take you to a new screen informing you that the recipe's page has not been found. Next to that warning you will see an option that says you can create this page. Click create this page as shown below.

When you click the create this page link you will be taken to the main editing window. This is where all the information for your entire recipes page is saved, stored, and edited. All content needs to be entered into this window. To make sure you are in the right place, the window should look just like this:

Hopefully this is the page you see. If you don't go back one step and make sure you did indeed click "Create this page". Now on to formating

Categorizing

Now that you are at the edit page of your brand new entry submission we need to add something don't we? The first thing you will want to add in the entry window is the categories it will belong too. Categories in the edit window are entered in the form of

[[category:Category Name]]

There are many categories and you will most like want to sort your recipe by more than one. Some categories to sort by are: Category:Recipes by Author, Category:Main Ingredients, Category:Recipes by Food Type, Category:Recipes by Meal, and by Category:Recipes by Cuisine.

So for example I could sort my recipe by my name (Jpfan01), then by cuisine type (Thai), then by the ingredient (Chicken), and finally the food type (Noodle). As an example here is the category sorting I did for my Pad Thai Recipe so that you can see the formatting. Following the categories you will also want to add a submitted by entry which is also pictured. Simply replace my name with yours.

Please be conservative when creating brand new categories. Like we don't need a "breaded chicken" and "chicken" category both in the ingredient section. If it is something no one else has used though and it is key to the recipe feel free to make a new category, just make sure it's need. Follow these guidelines and you're good to go:

• Pay close attention to spelling, and when creating a new category, please stick to existing naming conventions. For example, as a general rule the recipe categories are all singular; i.e. "Potato" not "Potatoes".
• When creating a new subcategory, remember to add its parent category into your entry. (i.e. add [category:Main Ingredients]] into your entry for "Celery".
• If you want to create a link to a category in the body of your recipe (for example see

   [[:category:Jpfan01's Recipes|Jpfan01]]) 

  the : before the first category is necessary. Otherwise the category will assign itself to the entire guide and leave a blank spot in your text. If you do it as written you get...Jpfan01

Formatting

Before we begin filling in the meat of your recipe I'd like to go over just a few formatting tips and techniques. Most recipes tend not to be composed of one part or stage in their creation. Some have a core meat component then a seperate sauce component for instance. For that we can create seperate sections to divide the recipe up. Even nicer is that at the top of the page there will be a nice contents chapter menu so people can skip around. At the top of this guide you can see an example of just that.

Creation and numbering of sections

Sections are created by creating their headers, as below:

==Section==

===Subsection===

====Sub-subsection====

Please do not use only one equals sign on a side (=text here=); this causes a title the size of the page name, which is taken care of automatically.

Text Effects and Bullets for Lists

Sadly wiki does not use the same vbcode that we are used to on the board. Wiki has special code for things like italics or bold print or underlined words. To save yourself some time at the top of the edit page the first three buttons with a bold B and and italicized I and an Ab that are underlined are there for you to use. If you like to type it as you go and not use the buttons you can use these codes:

''Italicized Text Goes Here'' for italics it's double apostrophes on each side.
'''Bold text Goes here''' for bold print it's triple apostrophes on each side.
[[Underlined Text Goes Here]] for underlined text it's double brackets on each side.

Be cautious with underlining though as underlining in wiki links to internal wiki topics that may or may not have anything entered for them.

To add a bullet before any line simple use an asterisk * like so:

• List Item 1
• List Item 2

There are some other formatting tricks you can use if you like. Feel free to research the rest of them here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext

Now that the formatting stuff is out of the way lets get into the steps of writing an example recipe. The format we'll use is pretty standard for most recipes and tends to work best for them.

Creating in-line links

One of the nicest things about the wiki environment is the ease of interlinking of entries. There's no need to use long http: strings for every little link you want. Just like almost everything else you've seen so far, you can create a link by using square brackets around a word. In addition, by adding a | seperator, we can then specify what word will be linked much as we can with a [url] tag in vb code.

As mentioned above, linking categories takes one extra simple as a leading colon is needed to keep them from automatically becoming a topic category.

For Example:

[[Mashed Potatoes]] leads to a specific recipe, while [[:category:Potato]] leads to a category... 
Personally if I'm talking about the [[:category:Potato|Potato]] category, I prefer to write it like so.

Gives us: Mashed Potatoes leads to a specific recipe, while category:Potato leads to a category... Personally if I'm talking about the Potato category, I prefer to write it like so.

Editing the Core of Your Recipe

This is where it all starts. Yes, I said starts. All the categorizing and formatting stuff was more a technicality than anything. At this point we are going to begin entering in all the juicy details of your recipe as well as the instructional photos.

Introduction

Most people tend to have an introduction paragraph of some sort at the beginning of their recipe. This lets you introduce the recipe itself, maybe tell a story of where you learned it. Including a basic description of the food and its taste and style wouldn't hurt either. It helps people browsing recipes decide if it's something they could eat or not. Sometimes pictures of the food don't tell much about the food besides it looks good. What it may not say is that it burns like one of the lower layers of hell for example. People have different food preferences so the descriptions help them decide if your recipe is right for them.

Ingredients

The first thing most people want to see with any recipe is whats in it. So Using the bulleting method from above (Using * at the beginning of a line) you'll want to list the ingredients one by one and the amount of each that will be needed. It's not a bad idea to make the ingredients their own section as well using the technique from above with the = sign. You can see it done where it says "Ingredients".

• 1/2 cup Ingredient one
• 1/4 Tablespoon Ingredient 2
• 2 pieces of Meat 1
• 1/3 Teaspoon water

... and so on. Make sure to list every single part of it here.

Adding Recipe Instructions

In this section we will go over entering the steps involved in making your recipe. This section for the most part is very straight forward. The hardest part of it is the task of inserting images into the recipe.

• List the first step of your recipe like this with a bullet.
• List the second step of your recipe. If this step requires an associated picture with it to show what you are doing we can add it underneath.

Adding a Photo

A few ground rules with photos you upload:

• Please try to keep the size of the images to under 80kb
• Please try to make the images an appropriate size, they don't need to be in 1600x1200. A standard size here is 640x480 for all instructional images and maybe an 800x600 image for the final product.
• Label the images appropriately. If you are making a recipe for devil's food cake devil01, devil02 or devilmix, devilbatter are far more appropriate than just 01, 02, 03 or image1, image2.
• If you are using a simple ingredient like salt or butter or water, there may already be an image uploaded onto the wiki for that. There isn't a reason to add two and you can look through images already uploaded right here: Image Search. It even has a convenient search function.

If you look to your left at the bottom of the menu you should see a link called "Upload File" in the toolbox menu. In case you don't, it looks like this:

Clicking this will bring you to the upload screen which should look like this:

As you can see, we have an area to enter the location of the image you want to use. Below that is an area that shows the destination filename that will be on the server here for the wiki. Remember that by default it capitalizes the first letter even if it was lowercase in your filename. Remember this because when using the image in this section it is indeed case sensitive.

The last step of this process is to insert the image into your recipe. Underneath the step you made with a bullet you want to place the text

[[image:ImageFilename.jpg]]

Remember that the image name is case sensitive.

These are the main components of adding a recipe to the Goons with Spoons wiki. Next we will do a short example recipe showing both code and how it looks when saved. This hopefully will help if need be with you visualizing how it will look as you type it up.

Example Recipe

This is how it will look when saved

This is my recipe for Delicious Meal. It was designed by my mom. She learned it from the vikings. It's a very sweet meal with a slight tangy taste to it.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup water
• 2 Yak legs
• 1/3 Teaspoon salt

Method

• Boil Water and slowly stir in 1/3 Teaspoon salt
• Place Yak Legs into boiling water and slowly check if the meat is becoming tender.

• Place on a plate and serve.

This is how it will look in code form

Posting a Recipe on the SA forums and the GWS Wiki

Transfering from Something Awful easily

Most the time we don't put our recipes straight onto the wiki, but post them on the Something Awful Forums for everyone to see and try or comment on. In this case it can be sort of a pain to move them to the wiki, but there are a few tricks that can make it go as fast an as smooth as possible. Word, Works, Open Office, Wordpad even all are your friend.

The first task is going to remove all the vb code from your SA post. Copy the whole post into one of the word processing programs I listed. In this tutorial I'm using word for the simple fact everyone owns Word or Open Office. In most the programs it will be under edit then replace. In word 2007 it's on the far right.

When the replace window opens up you're going to search for all image tags so type in the find area [img] and in the replace area type in [[image:

After that you need to remove the closing tag so in the find area type [/img] and in replace type ]]

This will remove all the image vb code from your SA post. If you used anything like bold or italics you will need to remove those and it's easiest to do that with the same method as we did for the image code.

Now by hand you'll have to go through and remove the image host code which is probably something like http://img.waffleimages.com or something similar. Since each image will have different code you can't just feed it into the find and replace tool. When removing the html remember to leave the filename.jpg part and simply capitalize the first letter (remember when uploading it auto-capitalizes the first letter).

Next you need to simple read through and add an * to each separate step to distinguish it and add any sections markers == that you want. This should make transferring the code from SA to the Goons with Spoons wiki take no more than 5 minutes.

The part that is going to take the most time is the image transferring. Hopefully all the images you used in your thread were contained or organized in a folder on your computer before uploading them to whatever image host you used.

If you didn't save the images, open up your thread on Something Awful and right click and save as every picture in it into one folder.

Once you have all those pictures saved you will need to follow the adding a picture section in this guide and upload each picture one by one. Please try to keep pictures under 80kb and 640x480. If all goes right every image you upload should match up with all the code you changed and saved in your wiki entry.

If for some reason the images aren't appearing, check your code was replaced correctly that it does say

[[image:image.jpg]]

If it does check your file names match up, remember things are case sensitive.

Writing an entry easily uploaded to both sites

The method I use (Toast) is to write my recipes out for the wiki first. Sometimes I do this directly on the wiki, sometimes I do it in word (be careful in programs such as word though as sometimes there are apostrophe issues and other other minor character glitches.

Most of the formatting code for the wiki doesn't look horrible on a forum post if I'm in a hurry, otherwise I can use the find replace method outlined above to replace my

 ==, '' '' 

and the like with vb formating.

For images, start by naming them something intelligent and placing them in a folder by themselves so that you can easily upload them first to the wiki then to whatever hosting you're using for the SA forums.

In short, if you plan for it from the start, posting on both sites is easy and quick. This lets people comment and enjoy your recipes in the short term on the forums then go back and find them quick 3 months or 3 years later.

Other (Optional) Things

• The handy table of contents that you see at the top of the page only appears if you have more than three sections marked with ==. If you want to force the Table of Contents to appear (I usually do, especially for recipes with lots of pictures)simply enter __FORCETOC__ (that's two underscores on either side).

• To remove the [edit] boxes next to each section, you can enter __NOEDITSECTION__ again with two underscores on either side.