Forum Users: How To Convert HTML to BBCode (Forum Code)

[andrewwilson]

I have just posted a new offer on this forum today. I started off by using an image of the sales letter but I realsied that this is not great because Google can't spider and index an image for relevant searches.

Posting using BBCode is much better than using an image but it can be very time consuming to post using BB Code translating it from HTML.

I found a couple of tools that just made the job much easier. First I used an HTML to BBCode converter available here.
Very handy for salvaging as much formating as possible but an awful lot is still lost. Worse yet, on Jon's forum we can't set images within text using the [imgl][/imgl] and [imgr][/imgr] tags.

So I thought I'd make some tables and fake the effect. In BBCode tables are a bind. But I found a BBCode table generator here.

I dropped images into a 1x1 table and set text to fill a similar height and the job was done.

The page is not as pretty, IMHO as the original, but it works and can be indexed so searchers can now find the offer. What do you think?

[videomike]

Hi Andrew

I think the converting went well - looks all good. What does not look very good is the images with cut out background - whoever did that did not do a great job...
Also it seems that one paragraph "For several years..." has slipped in twice...

Mike

[andrewwilson]

Mike, I missed that, I have cleaned it up. thanks for the eagle eye.

The second image, I see what you mean, it must be a transparent PNG. I will replace it in the original from where it is being leached - the background is white on that page. The others look OK to my rheumy eyes.

Anyways, it saved me a huge amount of time compared to doing it on the first page I made on here. That was torture!

[videomike]

Haha, I am notorious for my eagle eye - but it fails me sometimes, too - I don't know how often I read my girl friends doctoral thesis, and others did that as well numerous times - and 10 minutes after we had the printed version my father spotted a duplicate word in one sentence of the epilog ... Lesson: you can't read your texts often enough and have enough people look at it - there will always be little mistakes...
The pic with the thermometer has a strange background, too. That often is the problem when pics are on white background first and get transferred to other sites.
Anyways - thanks for sharing your experience!

Mike

[andrewwilson]

I see what you mean, honestly, I'd never have spotted the thermometer one!

It is odd but I have never seen any kind of writeup about converting from an HTML page to BBCode and I had no idea that there ware any tools available to help. It is a shame that the implementatoin of BBCode does not seem to allow some fun layout and formating stuff. Seems very basic. If it were not for tables then I reckon it'd be very hard to make images look embedded.

[Meg]

I see what you mean, honestly, I'd never have spotted the thermometer one!

It is odd but I have never seen any kind of writeup about converting from an HTML page to BBCode and I had no idea that there ware any tools available to help. It is a shame that the implementatoin of BBCode does not seem to allow some fun layout and formating stuff. Seems very basic. If it were not for tables then I reckon it'd be very hard to make images look embedded.

But it looks as if BB is just HTML with square brackets "[" and "]" instead of "<" and ">"?

If so, you could use Notepad to convert all your "<" and ">" to the square bracket forms and thus use any kind of fun html you have around?

[videomike]

Meg - that would be too easy 
Unfortunately there is much more that you can do in (X)HMTL than you can do in BBCode - as far as I know there should be an option for forum admins to create own BBCode tags and define the resulting HTML Output.
@Jon: What do you think - any chance of implementing float left/right images here on jlforums.com?

Mike

[andrewwilson]

It would be good to have a greater range of BBCode functions enabled because sales pages as images do nothing for search engines.