Quick Links to Topics:

Introduction
How digress.it works
Ways to author a document for digress.it
Publishing your document

Introduction
The digress.it community site is a WordPress-based platform, so many of the same methods and conventions for writing a WordPress blog post apply to digress.it. The significant difference is that digress.it entries typically occupy an entire ‘blog’ or WordPress site. This feature allows you to divide your document into sections where each section is a WordPress blog post.

Because it can get confusing discussing blog posts and document sections, from hereon, note the following:

WordPress blog site = A single digress.it document
WordPress blog post = A single digress.it document section

You can publish large (100 + section) documents or small (1 section) documents on digress.it. It helps if your sections are relatively short. We are, after all, publishing on the web, and long sections will take longer for the reader to download in their browser. But, there is nothing to stop you publishing sub-sections separately.

How digress.it works
digress.it transforms a WordPress site into a self-contained document with a Table of Contents.

  • The reader can easily navigate backwards and forwards from one section to another using the links at the top and bottom of each document section.
  • digress.it automatically discovers the paragraphs in each document section and assigns them a unique link (URI) so that people can comment, annotate or discuss specific paragraphs of text.
  • Other parts of your document structure are also auto-discovered by digress.it. If you have images, tables, quotes, headings or lists in your document, digress.it will find them and assign a unique link for those, too. Our tests have shown digress.it to be very accurate in reading your document section structure and (ideally) you should not have to make any adjustments. If you repeatedly find a problem, please let us know.
  • digress.it has options to allow you to order your sections in a number of ways. However, the simplest option is to author your document sections in chronological order, starting with the title page or introduction and finishing with the conclusion of the document. Normally, WordPress would publish blog posts, with the most recent, first. digress.it merely reverses the order and displays the sections in the order that you authored them (unless you have configured it otherwise).

Ways to author a document for digress.it
We appreciate that many documents are written using a word processor, and have tried to ensure that documents written in this way can be easily published on digress.it. However, if you do not need to author your document in a Word Processor, there are advantages to authoring directly in the WordPress online editor:

  • Multiple authors can easily collaborate on a single document
  • A complete revision history of the document is maintained with the ability to roll-back to earlier versions.
  • The document is web-ready, native to digress.it. There is no two-stage process of ‘re-publishing’ on digress.it. You just write and publish.
  • You can embed video and other objects, using the full power and versatility of WordPress.

However, if you want to use a word processor, there are a few options. They are, in summary:

  1. Author directly in a desktop blogging client i.e. Windows Live Writer
  2. Author in Microsoft Word or Open Office and post to digress.it
  3. Author in Word or Open Office and copy and paste into a desktop blogging client. We have seen very good results with digress.it, by simply copying from your Word document, into a desktop client and posting to WordPress.
  4. Author in Word or Open Office and copy and paste into the WordPress editor. The original formatting is usually maintained.

You can also edit your original document once it’s on digress.it, adding multimedia, gadgets and widgets. If it is supported by WordPress, it is supported by digress.it.

You can control the typography through adjustments to the digress.it stylesheet, if you are able to upload new stylesheets to the server. We welcome contributors’ stylesheets on the digress.it website. Contact eddie@digress.it if you have a stylesheet or question.

Publishing your document
Once you have your document sections finished and saved as drafts, preview them to ensure that digress.it renders your content faithfully.

Some tips:

  • It is important that once you publish each document section, you do not alter the paragraph structure of the section. This is because people will comment on specific paragraphs that are identified by unique links (URIs). If you add or remove a paragraph after someone has commented on a section, their comment will point to the wrong paragraph.
  • If a document section has received no comments, it is safe to make changes.
  • When you have previewed and proofread your document, you can batch publish each section at once using the WordPress ‘Bulk Actions’ feature under ‘Posts – Edit’.
  • As with any Wordpress site, you can significantly alter the presentation of a site by developing your own WordPress theme or making adjustments to the stylesheet of an existing theme. digress.it allows you to select different stylesheets. Currently we offer two: ‘default’ and ‘classic’.

We are looking for a solution to allow comments to ‘follow’ paragraphs if they location, but this has not yet been implemented.