Need help with trip report format
 

Some trip reports are just so much easier to read and get useful information from, made partly so because they are nicely formatted. As a poster with computer skill deficiencies, I'd sure appreciate a quick tutorial in how to bold headings. Even though I type them in Word that way, they lose their boldness when I transfer the info to this site. Can someone teach me this trick? Thanks.

Hi Julie --

I use basic HTML tags around my headings. Here is a link that teaches basic HTML:

http://www.webmonkey.com/teachingtool/html.html

The HTML cheatsheet (linked on the left) shows the tags you'll want to use. Bolding starts with < b > before your text and uses < /b > after the point where you want the bolding to end. Be sure to remove the spaces I've put in between the brackets. That was done to show you the actual code!

Good luck!

If you do a search for 'color bold' you will see a post with some good info.

MP

Thanks. Looks like many have mastered the skill. Perhaps even I can too. Wish me luck.

<b> Oops, forgot to try it </b>

Please <b>do not</b> type a buch of information <b>single spaced</b> which gets tiresome to read pretty quickly.

Also, please break the report into plenty of paragraphs, and ones that don't take up the whole page!

I also don't think it hurts to add both detail <b>and</b> rationale for some of your feelings such as, &quot;the staff was rude&quot; or &quot;the food was poor&quot; or &quot;the room was small.&quot;

Examples really help people decide if your feelings seem valid to them or if they should be discounted.

What I find helpful in TRs - esp TRs where the poster went to multiple cities and towns - is to put the city/town at the beginning of each day &amp; post.

Say someone went to London, Paris and Rome. Sometimes, I just feel like reading the part on Paris. It's nice to just skim thru the posts and see <b>Paris</b> in the heading of a post and I can start reading there. A lot of times, it's too much effort for me to scroll thru all the posts (esp ones w/lots of replies) and try to guess which city it is on a particular day.

I also like TRs when the poster writes which cities they went on this trip. Lots of times the thread title would be, eg, Trip report to France. But the poster doesn't say which part of France. Then I'll have to read the entire TR to figure it out. If I'm only interested in reading about the Loire Valley, and the poster actually only went to Paris and Provence, then it's kind of a waste of my time.

I think the best formatted TR lately is the one by Robyn (aka artstuff)
http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=35116484

Dukey, good advice which I will try to keep in mind though I can see my report growing by the minute--and if you've seen my earlier report, you know I have something of a problem with length.

Anyway, thanks for the good advice. See, I already latched onto that paragraph thing.

Personally, I like it when you lay out the itinerary somewhere close to the top in one area as sort of a summary. It makes it easier to skim to a part that might be of most interest, plus it gives people a sense of your trip's timeline.

It's also possible that you might prefer to just write a report based on various categories---restaurants, etc. I've seen successful reports that cover restaurants, sights, and hotels in individual sections.

You can also use italics. For instance.
<b>Day 1: Paris</b>
<i>Restaurants visited: Cafe Henri, Le Palais du Royal</i>

italics is &lt; i &gt; and &lt;/ i&gt; (again without those spaces).

We hope to add features in the future that will make this sort of formating easier.

Katie H, I've been away from this site for a while and have just returned in the last 2 or 3 months. It's so nice to see Fodors take a more active approach to working with the site through you. Hope you're enjoying your assignement. IMO it's been very wise of Fodors to select you to work with us.

As long as you put in *spaces* to separate the paragraphs (and keep paragraphs relatively short) that's all you need for a read-able trip report imo.

This is great information! Trip reports on this forum have been invaluable to me as a traveler. I've never posted one myself but I'm planning on doing so after our trip to Provence and Barcelona this coming Fall. I keep travel journals for myself each time I travel but my weakness has been to not be very specific about locations and names of restaurants, etc.

For my next trip I have purchased a very small handheld voice recorder that is digital and will hold over 300 hours. My plan is to keep this with me and make voice notes along the way so I can keep track of the more detailed portions of the trip...we'll see how this works! Again - thanks for the helpful info.

My trick to remember hotel and restaurant names and address, just remember to grab a business card. I collect them along the way in a snack sized ziplock. Very handy for posting here on Fodor's (or writing up your trip report).