Did you know that you can highlight text on Writing.com? Just put any text you want highlighted between {highlight:yellow}{/highlight}. If yellow isn't your preferred shade of highlighter, you can also replace yellow with blue, green, orange, or pink!

Popnotes are a great way of including information in a convenient pop-up window rather than in-line. You can customize both what wording appears in the Popnote you hover over, and what appears in the box that pops up. These can be great for caveats, disclaimers, qualifiers, etc.

Dropnotes ▼ , are a great way of including information that you don't necessarily want to have visible at all times. These can be great for rules, information, historical data, etc.

Using the tags {hide}{/hide} will keep anything you place between the tags concealed from view in the item. This is a very handy tag if you maintain a forum or some other item you regularly update and don't want to have to completely revise every time. You can just hide the stuff that isn't relevant at the moment and nobody will even know it's there!

Did you know you can randomly rotate everything from item numbers to images to font colors? Just add a comma and another variable. For example, {c:red,blue,green}{/c} will make any text between the tags rotate colors between those three options every time the page is refreshed.

Do you have a contest or activity with multiple logos? Use {image:#######,#######,#######} (where the hashtags are replaced with the image numbers) to rotate between them so that every time someone clicks on your activity they see a different logo!

You can even do the same with items, where {bitem:#######,#######,#######} (where the hashtags are replaced with item numbers) will rotate different items using the same link. This can be a really effective tool if you want to promote different items in a limited space. For example, if you want to encourage someone to reciprocate a review, at the bottom of your review there could be a rotating item that says "please consider returning the favor and reviewing this" and then providing a randomly rotating list of a few of your current works so that each review recipient receives a random one.

You can also invert/flip emoticons around by adding an "h" or a "v" (or both!) before the "e" in the WritingML. For example, {e:monkey} looks like , but you can also do {he:monkey} , {ve:monkey} , or even {hve:monkey} to orient things a little differently.

You can insert a progress meter that shows how far you are toward accomplishing a goal with the following WritingML: {code:progress(25%,green,red)}. You can change the percentage and the colors as needed. Here's what that prior formatting looks like:



I've used progress meters before to indicate how far along a work in progress is, and to keep track of how far along I am with a particular reviewing or reading goal. It can be a great way to encourage participants in a longer-term activity so they're up to date on how far they've come.

Have you ever been trying to format something that's required you to repeat a WritingML codes a number of times? Like {indent}{indent}{indent} to get the proper left alignment of a list, or even just a couple of spaces by using {s}{s}{s}? Did you know that {indent:3} and {s:3} do the same thing? This is a really handy shortcut for things like BioBlocks and other places where you have a limited character count to work with but still want to format things a certain way.

Speaking of lists, you can create a number of different list formats with WritingML. I'll actually use a list format to link to the specific different ways you can list things:

1 WritingML Help for list
2 Basic List
3 Formatted List
4 Formatted Lettered List
5 List with a break
6 Multiple Lists

Like lists, there are a number of fun things you can embed in your items, posts, newsfeed updates, etc. Rather than write out instructions for each one, please check out WritingML Help for embed, and the list of things you can embed include:

         - Static or Webpage items
         - Images (which can also be scaled)
         - Photos (which can also be scaled)
         - Polls
         - Audio
         - YouTube videos
         - Awardicons (which can also be scaled)
         - Merit Badges (which can also be scaled)