Help:Contents

As the Broken Man mentions on the Main Page, this site took some damage. It's part of the challenges of living in the age of the 'tubes of internets.' We are in the midst of a rebuilding campaign and we welcome all the help we can get. Most of the character pages that we had are gone. Some are recoverable (see below), and some will need to be rebuilt from scratch.

That's the bad news.

The good news is we are back and we are making great progress with the rebuilding. For some of you veterans, you will see that we are improving the templates used for building character pages, and are just beginning the process of incorporating them into the initial batch of pages that are currently linked and displayable. So most of what you see is a hodgepodge of contents. Thrown together bits of old data with little to no formatting.

Another bit of good news, we have ramped up security measures a bit by upgrading the software and adding a few features to keep the vandalism 'bots at bay. So current and new content should be safe and this site will be a steady resource for information on one of the all time best super hero mythologies of our times.

Read on if you are interested in contributing to the restoration process of the officially sanctioned website, dedicated to the award winning comic series Astro City.

Become a Digital Archeologist For Herocopia

One of the most precious aspects of the Herocopia Project has been the accumulation of a massive warehouse of information about the Characters of Astro City. Unfortunately, Herocopia.com underwent a serious crash that left a lot of interesting data for and about Astro City hanging in the limbos of the massively complex cavities of the internet. We are working diligently to restore as much of this previous information as possible. We are also adding new content as time and the urge to so permit.

We have been searching the web for old saved Herocopia pages, along with checking local hard-drives of veteran contributors. We have discovered that the Wayback Machine located at www.archive.org is a fairly good source and can be mined for herocopia.com content from the past. The only problem, it requires a lot of hand editing to bring it back to a format suitable for mediawiki development and deployment.

First steps are simple, just a bit tedious.

1. Use the Wayback Machine site to find old Herocopia webpages. See links sections below.
2. Be sure to check the Wayback timeline to find the best capture of data from the original Herocopia site. Dates from 2009 are proving the most fruitful, but it can vary dramatically from page to page.
3. Copy the text (not the page source) to your computer's clipboard.
4. Head back here to the new Herocopia site and dump the text to that character's page. Create a new page if needed.
5. Add a "{{{cutPaste}}}" template at the top, to indicate this is a cut-n-paste entry that still needs editing, and if appropriate, a "{{{stub}}}" template at the bottom to signal that this page needs more authorship work.
6. Later on, you or a fellow Herocopia author can incorporate the old raw information into the new template structures that we use now. More information on that coming right up, after we take a Links-break.

Links

http://web.archive.org/web/20090217195513/http://herocopia.com/index.php/Category:Heroes

http://web.archive.org/web/20100401223306/http://www.herocopia.com/index.php/Category:Villains

http://web.archive.org/web/20100401223551/http://www.herocopia.com/index.php/Category:Teams

http://web.archive.org/web/20100401223253/http://www.herocopia.com/index.php/Category:Civilians

http://web.archive.org/web/20100401223556/http://www.herocopia.com/index.php/Category:The_City

Mr. Smartie Notes: STATUS! These are estimates, but currently about 30-40% of the actual old content, and 20-25% of the total pages have made the migration from the old site.

Constructing a Character Page

We've got templates. Not very many, but for editing Characters, these work great. They work for Heroes and Villains (the templates signed a neutrality clause) and for now, can even be used for Teams, Civilian pages. It might be a stretch to get them to work for City related pages, and until they have templates of their own, building a new City page can best be done by using an existing Landmark, Neighborhood, or other City page as a model. Plans are in place to design special templates for these other page categories as time permits. But for now think of the character templates as being generic, and use them wherever you feel you can make them work for whatever content you are doing.

A Character Page is usually constructed using the following two Character templates. In fact, for consistancy across the Herocopia site, it is highly recommended to use them. With practice, you will find them very helpful and much easier than building a Character page from scratch.

• Template:Character infobox2
• Template:Character page

Each template has several parameters (all optional) that can be filled in where appropriate. It will depend on the character, how much information is available from the stories, or if the information applies. Currently two of the best examples are the Silver Agent and Astra Furst pages.

These two templates are also undergoing major editing work of their own, mainly cosmetic. But any future changes made in the templates, should not effect the outer mechanics of authors using them to construct pages. Another reason to stick with using these templates when building a character page.

See each templates' associated documentation pages for more information.

Mr. Smartie Notes: UPDATE! Both the Character infobox2 template and the Character page template now includes detailed instructions for how to use them effectively. Please click on their links for more details.

General Editing Tools

Herocopia.com is a MediaWiki website. Do you want to contribute, but do not know how to edit pages? These guides might be of help.

• Wikipedia's style guidelines - lots of good style tips here.
• How-to... in Wikipedia
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting - Formatting tips

Quick tips for creating and editing pages

Create a new page

• Go to the two Character templates and copy the "syntax" portion from the template's documentation.
• Then navigate to the page you want to create, i.e. to create a page for "Samaritan" enter

  http://www.herocopia.com/index.php/Samaritan

  in your browser.
• Click the "edit" tab, paste the template code, and start creating!

Link to another page

• Surround the word in double brackets (i.e.

  [[Samaritan]]

  ) and it will link to that page, whether it exists yet or not.

Linking Page to a Category

• At the bottom of a page, enter

  [[Category: (category name)]]

  and it will link to that category, as well as include the page in that category (whether the category exists yet or not).

• To create a link to a category *without* including the page in that category, add a colon in front, i.e.

  [[:Category: (category name)]]

  .

• Wikipedia Category Help http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category

• Wikipedia Categorization FAQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorisation_FAQ

Image Uploading

• Check Special:Imagelist to see if the image you need already exists.

• If not, upload a new image here (400 pixels across is a good size for most images): http://www.herocopia.com/index.php/Special:Upload

• Then place this tag into the page:

  [[Image:filename.jpg]]

  .

• To align the image to the right, use this tag:

  [[Image:filename.jpg|right]]

  .

• To place a thumbnail of a larger image, use:

  [[Image:filename.jpg|right|thumb|250px]]

  .

• Any text entered in the tag that isn't recognized will appear as a caption in the thumbnail image, i.e.

  [[Image:filename.jpg|right|thumb|250px|This is a picture of Samaritan]]

  .

• More image help: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Images_and_other_uploaded_files

Roll-Your-Own Stats

... with Roll-Your-Own Titles.

Think of these as Totally Optional Template Options that provide additional flexibility to this template for building infoboxes for things other than characters. In constructing this template, I made it lean heavily to the needs of an individual character for content and topics, yet it is also very flexible, and yes you can indeed add a option for team members.

Here's a current example for Apollo11.

|PD1title      = Members:
|PD1info       = Garrison, Carruthers, McCaleb, eight others so far unnamed

Each section of the infobox (AstroFacts, PersonalData, and InfoDump) have three of these title-info pairs. We can add more if needed. We can also promote an Optional-option to permanent-option if we find the particular topic keeps cropping up. The difference between these is you must provide a title (which can be anything you want it to be) to go along with the info, and you must pair the names correctly

PD1title
PD1info

PD2title
PD2info

PD3title
PD3info

AF1title
AF1info

AF2title
AF2info

AF3title
AF3info

ID1title
ID1info

ID2title
ID2info

ID3title
ID3info

If it warrants it, I can see a Team Template as something that will probably be built in the future. I am OK with using this one template for now. Let's try it for awhile, and see if the need is strong enough for doing a team one. Or maybe, given its dynamics and flexibility, this template needs a different name.