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A typing lesson? What is that doing here, you may wonder?

Well, typing text anywhere in Eclipse is a little different than what you're used to on the old site, and we might as well get that down at the same time as I take you through how to create a custom box on your main Profile page in Eclipse.

The reason for the differences both here, and typing in Eclipse in general, is you no longer have unfettered access to HTML and CSS. As I mentioned in my previous entry, there are site security reasons for this, so I can guarantee you nothing is going to bring that functionality back. What I do hope will happen is that functionality related to custom boxes will expand in other ways, with time, once it's not just those of us hardcore beta-testers who have been using Eclipse long term. And I do think that once they don't have to dedicate any more resources to maintaining two versions of the site (a lot harder than you would think), you might start to see features roll out a bit more often.

Anyway, I mentioned my previous journal entry. But where to find the thing? As I'm writing this lesson up, there's no convenient index for all of my Eclipse How-To's. So, since I'm allowed two more custom boxes as a Core member on my page, I'm going to make a simple little one I'll probably keep on there until the end of May 2021. Maybe more if these things actually get popular, but anyway...I'm going to make a custom box to keep my tutorial index. My design aesthetic tends to be very simple, so the final product is going to be very small and streamlined, but I can still give you a taste through screenshots of what functionality there is before I go down to the final version.

The first thing I want to point out about custom boxes is, they don't change with theme. Not for Dark, not for Light, not for Green. How you design your custom box is how it's going to look regardless of what theme you and your visitors are using to access your page. Time for another "three themes" set of screenshots, except I'm going to scroll down a little so you can really see how my existing custom box functions.

Yeaaaaah, my page is really not set up for the Light theme. Maybe there should be a warning about that. X_X

(Note: Also, if you're mainly a Literature artist or visit a lot of Lit galleries, I'm going to suggest staying the heck AWAY from Light Theme. Green might be more tolerable, but look at what the Light theme does with all those text boxes. OUCH.)

Hmm...maybe I can actually put a warning on my page, before we dive into a custom box, so we can delve into typing and how it behaves differently in Eclipse than the old site. And while I'm at it, I'll show you what options your artist bio box has, since you are really going to want to set this box up before you lose access to the old site, if you want to use your old page as a reference. (I stopped updating my non-Eclipse page at least a year ago, BTW.) From what I understand, your artist bio was migrated over to Eclipse once, but I believe this was a one-time update, so you may find what's currently in your Eclipse bio to be out of date.

Click on these screenshots to see my notes on what you can do with your bio (and a few other bits of silliness because I can ). This is pretty similar to what you would've had on the old site, but as you can see above, you have four tabs when you're filling it out.

The one real difference I noticed is on the social media page...this seems to have been greatly modernized and expanded compared to what was available to you on the old site. The only caveat to this is the sites you see are those based in the Anglosphere (though used worldwide). Currently there is no place to add links for ВКонтакте (VKontakte), Taringa!, Skyrock, Line, or any of the social media sites used in mainland China. If you have one of those, you'll want to enter it in the free-form text area under "My Info" in your bio, or put it in a custom box.

Back to that free-form text area. In the first screenshot below, you'll see several pointers about text formatting. The next three screenshots show the dialogue boxes for adding a link to highlighted text, embedding a YouTube video, and picking an emoji. (The "Add Deviation" and "Add Gallery" dialogues work much like they did in the previous installment when setting up the non-custom sections on your main Profile page.)

A few key takeaways that are true across most of Eclipse:

The options above the text will not appear unless you highlight some text.
Ctrl + I, Ctrl + B, and Ctrl + U do work. However, if you use the toolbar to bold, underline, or italicize, Ctrl + Z (undo) will NOT undo that action.
Well, after that little tour, I finished my message and saved it. Let's take a look at the results...

Hey, wait--what the heck happened here? You're probably going to be wondering this the first several times you end your message with an emoji in Eclipse. Haven't codes like : puke : , : ), and : huggle : been part of dA since forever? Did they suddenly get taken away so you have to pick from the emoji menu every time you want to use one?

Thank goodness, no!

Eclipse is set up so that typing certain character combinations won't automatically result in an emoji, because sometimes there are occasions where you might not want that to happen. So how do we fix the problem above?

All you have to do is go back into the text you just typed, drop your cursor immediately after the emoji in question...and hit the space bar once. That's it--problem solved. In fact, funny enough, since I've been in Eclipse for so long, I've found myself compulsively hitting the space bar after any emoji regardless of which version of the site I'm in!

Fixing the problem above, and below...the final result!

And now...drumroll please...you are FINALLY ready to tackle that custom box! The things you learned about typing and formatting text in Eclipse will come in handy there (as well as just about anywhere else you can type in Eclipse, such as comments, journals, statuses, Literature, etc.). See below for how to insert a new custom box. If you need a refresher on how I got to this point, check out the last tutorial in this series. By the time you're reading this, that helpful index I'm creating right now will already be on my page.

You'll get a dialogue box (shown below). You'll need to close that out, to get to the blank box you can work with by clicking the pencil icon.

Now let's see what we can do in here. The first thing I want to do is change the title of this box so it explains what I'm doing with it. That's something you may want to do before you start editing anything else, though you will still be able to do it later if you change your mind. Type in the new title, and then hit the Save button. See below for the dialogue box and result.

Next I click the "Edit Content" button to do just that. Which pops me back into that nondescript-looking box from earlier, except now it's a properly-titled nondescript-looking box. A nondescript-looking box that happens to be talking about backgrounds except there isn't a single button in sight that looks like it might be set up for that. Is it just rudely mocking you or what?

Well, first I'm going to just plow ahead and set up some basic stuff, ignoring the fact that it's talking about a background yet I can't see a button for it. I'm going to set up the text and links I want in the box, using the text formatting tricks I described earlier. And...a few more that you don't find in comments, your bio, etc. See the screenshots below for those:

By the way, one of the takeaways from above is that if you're planning on using very light font, or white, you probably don't want to set that font color until you're 100% sure your text is EXACTLY what you want.

Below, I got a pretty passable result. The only catch is right now, we don't have one of those backgrounds it's claiming exist. Also, look what happens when I change to another theme...

Yeah, that is so not what I am after. Clearly in order to get that to display the way I want--like the box below--something has got to be done about that background. So now we're going to find the bloody things.

I actually had to watch a brief video from team to remember how to find this (also makes a nice little quick summary of the things I'm covering in my more detailed tutorial). Holy shit on a stick, that was REALLY hidden! So yeah, I had to mouse over a seemingly empty space to the left of the image-insert button in order to find it.

There are four preset backgrounds, two of which I show here, and one of which is REALLY not useful in a text-only box like I am using. There are also some preset gradients, two of which I show, and some of which I might actually like if I weren't intentionally going for a more spartan page design. Of course, you can also select a solid color, and I'm going to go for my ever-predictable Kylo Rennish black.

THERE we go. Black like the night sky, black like the depths of my soul--AHEM. As I was saying...

What if you don't like any of those background options? Well, thankfully, for the more talented visual artists than myself, you do have one more choice: to use an image of your own design instead. Clicking the "Add Image" button will take you into a pretty standard deviation selection window. I'm going to use my Eclipse cover image as an example...

The first screenshot ("Contain" option) definitely didn't work as intended, since my image isn't exactly the size of the box I've created. Thankfully, as you'll see in that screenshot, there is a chance to select two other options that might be more useful, depending on what kind of image you're using: Tiled or Cover.

Now that you've gotten that far with your custom background image, you might be wondering, what's with that white haze over your image? Depending on what you're doing, that might be fine, or you might want to get rid of it. Behold, in the third screenshot above, yet another barely-visible color selection box! And below, see how to manipulate that "haze," or overlay color.

Of course, I'm sure you can tell that just like the dA preset backgrounds above, unless I were to use a black, semi-transparent overlay, the image I am using really isn't suitable for a mostly-text box with white font. So now I'm going to go back to my desired solid-black background, save, and show you the final result!

Whew...FINALLY!

Well, now that that's done, I really need to go to bed--because, as you can see by that last screenshot...I stayed up way too late on a Sunday night. The next installment(s) may come a bit slower, due to the work week, but the next one after this is going to be navigating your Watch page.

Any questions about updating your bio or working with custom boxes? Ask away!

(Just please, NO debates/attacks/arguing about the lack of HTML, etc. That's so NOT the purpose of this series.)

;) (Wink) — Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

A typing lesson? What is that doing here, you may wonder?

Well, typing text anywhere in Eclipse is a little different than what you're used to on the old site, and we might as well get that down at the same time as I take you through how to create a custom box on your main Profile page in Eclipse.

The reason for the differences both here, and typing in Eclipse in general, is you no longer have unfettered access to HTML and CSS. As I mentioned in my previous entry, there are site security reasons for this, so I can guarantee you nothing is going to bring that functionality back. What I do hope will happen is that functionality related to custom boxes will expand in other ways, with time, once it's not just those of us hardcore beta-testers who have been using Eclipse long term. And I do think that once they don't have to dedicate any more resources to maintaining two versions of the site (a lot harder than you would think), you might start to see features roll out a bit more often.

Anyway, I mentioned my previous journal entry. But where to find the thing? As I'm writing this lesson up, there's no convenient index for all of my Eclipse How-To's. So, since I'm allowed two more custom boxes as a Core member on my page, I'm going to make a simple little one I'll probably keep on there until the end of May 2021. Maybe more if these things actually get popular, but anyway...I'm going to make a custom box to keep my tutorial index. My design aesthetic tends to be very simple, so the final product is going to be very small and streamlined, but I can still give you a taste through screenshots of what functionality there is before I go down to the final version.

The first thing I want to point out about custom boxes is, they don't change with theme. Not for Dark, not for Light, not for Green. How you design your custom box is how it's going to look regardless of what theme you and your visitors are using to access your page. Time for another "three themes" set of screenshots, except I'm going to scroll down a little so you can really see how my existing custom box functions.

Yeaaaaah, my page is really not set up for the Light theme. Maybe there should be a warning about that. X_X

(Note: Also, if you're mainly a Literature artist or visit a lot of Lit galleries, I'm going to suggest staying the heck AWAY from Light Theme. Green might be more tolerable, but look at what the Light theme does with all those text boxes. OUCH.)

Hmm...maybe I can actually put a warning on my page, before we dive into a custom box, so we can delve into typing and how it behaves differently in Eclipse than the old site. And while I'm at it, I'll show you what options your artist bio box has, since you are really going to want to set this box up before you lose access to the old site, if you want to use your old page as a reference. (I stopped updating my non-Eclipse page at least a year ago, BTW.) From what I understand, your artist bio was migrated over to Eclipse once, but I believe this was a one-time update, so you may find what's currently in your Eclipse bio to be out of date.

Click on these screenshots to see my notes on what you can do with your bio (and a few other bits of silliness because I can ). This is pretty similar to what you would've had on the old site, but as you can see above, you have four tabs when you're filling it out.

The one real difference I noticed is on the social media page...this seems to have been greatly modernized and expanded compared to what was available to you on the old site. The only caveat to this is the sites you see are those based in the Anglosphere (though used worldwide). Currently there is no place to add links for ВКонтакте (VKontakte), Taringa!, Skyrock, Line, or any of the social media sites used in mainland China. If you have one of those, you'll want to enter it in the free-form text area under "My Info" in your bio, or put it in a custom box.

Back to that free-form text area. In the first screenshot below, you'll see several pointers about text formatting. The next three screenshots show the dialogue boxes for adding a link to highlighted text, embedding a YouTube video, and picking an emoji. (The "Add Deviation" and "Add Gallery" dialogues work much like they did in the previous installment when setting up the non-custom sections on your main Profile page.)

A few key takeaways that are true across most of Eclipse:

The options above the text will not appear unless you highlight some text.
Ctrl + I, Ctrl + B, and Ctrl + U do work. However, if you use the toolbar to bold, underline, or italicize, Ctrl + Z (undo) will NOT undo that action.
Well, after that little tour, I finished my message and saved it. Let's take a look at the results...

Hey, wait--what the heck happened here? You're probably going to be wondering this the first several times you end your message with an emoji in Eclipse. Haven't codes like : puke : , : ), and : huggle : been part of dA since forever? Did they suddenly get taken away so you have to pick from the emoji menu every time you want to use one?

Thank goodness, no!

Eclipse is set up so that typing certain character combinations won't automatically result in an emoji, because sometimes there are occasions where you might not want that to happen. So how do we fix the problem above?

All you have to do is go back into the text you just typed, drop your cursor immediately after the emoji in question...and hit the space bar once. That's it--problem solved. In fact, funny enough, since I've been in Eclipse for so long, I've found myself compulsively hitting the space bar after any emoji regardless of which version of the site I'm in!

Fixing the problem above, and below...the final result!

And now...drumroll please...you are FINALLY ready to tackle that custom box! The things you learned about typing and formatting text in Eclipse will come in handy there (as well as just about anywhere else you can type in Eclipse, such as comments, journals, statuses, Literature, etc.). See below for how to insert a new custom box. If you need a refresher on how I got to this point, check out the last tutorial in this series. By the time you're reading this, that helpful index I'm creating right now will already be on my page.

You'll get a dialogue box (shown below). You'll need to close that out, to get to the blank box you can work with by clicking the pencil icon.

Now let's see what we can do in here. The first thing I want to do is change the title of this box so it explains what I'm doing with it. That's something you may want to do before you start editing anything else, though you will still be able to do it later if you change your mind. Type in the new title, and then hit the Save button. See below for the dialogue box and result.

Next I click the "Edit Content" button to do just that. Which pops me back into that nondescript-looking box from earlier, except now it's a properly-titled nondescript-looking box. A nondescript-looking box that happens to be talking about backgrounds except there isn't a single button in sight that looks like it might be set up for that. Is it just rudely mocking you or what?

Well, first I'm going to just plow ahead and set up some basic stuff, ignoring the fact that it's talking about a background yet I can't see a button for it. I'm going to set up the text and links I want in the box, using the text formatting tricks I described earlier. And...a few more that you don't find in comments, your bio, etc. See the screenshots below for those:

By the way, one of the takeaways from above is that if you're planning on using very light font, or white, you probably don't want to set that font color until you're 100% sure your text is EXACTLY what you want.

Below, I got a pretty passable result. The only catch is right now, we don't have one of those backgrounds it's claiming exist. Also, look what happens when I change to another theme...

Yeah, that is so not what I am after. Clearly in order to get that to display the way I want--like the box below--something has got to be done about that background. So now we're going to find the bloody things.

I actually had to watch a brief video from team to remember how to find this (also makes a nice little quick summary of the things I'm covering in my more detailed tutorial). Holy shit on a stick, that was REALLY hidden! So yeah, I had to mouse over a seemingly empty space to the left of the image-insert button in order to find it.

There are four preset backgrounds, two of which I show here, and one of which is REALLY not useful in a text-only box like I am using. There are also some preset gradients, two of which I show, and some of which I might actually like if I weren't intentionally going for a more spartan page design. Of course, you can also select a solid color, and I'm going to go for my ever-predictable Kylo Rennish black.

THERE we go. Black like the night sky, black like the depths of my soul--AHEM. As I was saying...

What if you don't like any of those background options? Well, thankfully, for the more talented visual artists than myself, you do have one more choice: to use an image of your own design instead. Clicking the "Add Image" button will take you into a pretty standard deviation selection window. I'm going to use my Eclipse cover image as an example...

The first screenshot ("Contain" option) definitely didn't work as intended, since my image isn't exactly the size of the box I've created. Thankfully, as you'll see in that screenshot, there is a chance to select two other options that might be more useful, depending on what kind of image you're using: Tiled or Cover.

Now that you've gotten that far with your custom background image, you might be wondering, what's with that white haze over your image? Depending on what you're doing, that might be fine, or you might want to get rid of it. Behold, in the third screenshot above, yet another barely-visible color selection box! And below, see how to manipulate that "haze," or overlay color.

Of course, I'm sure you can tell that just like the dA preset backgrounds above, unless I were to use a black, semi-transparent overlay, the image I am using really isn't suitable for a mostly-text box with white font. So now I'm going to go back to my desired solid-black background, save, and show you the final result!

Whew...FINALLY!

Well, now that that's done, I really need to go to bed--because, as you can see by that last screenshot...I stayed up way too late on a Sunday night. The next installment(s) may come a bit slower, due to the work week, but the next one after this is going to be navigating your Watch page.

Any questions about updating your bio or working with custom boxes? Ask away!

(Just please, NO debates/attacks/arguing about the lack of HTML, etc. That's so NOT the purpose of this series.)