Tile Editor Tips And Tricks
Information to jazz up your online tile

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Some hints to enter the passwords: When the User name and Password box pops up, leave the User Name blank, do not type anything in it. In the Password line, type your password exactly as it was given. No extra spaces, and same uppercase and lowercase characters. For example, password Light and password light are different passwords. If you still can't get in please email the webmaster by clicking the link at the bottom of the page.

These tricks are not too hard, but not too easy either. If you need more explanations, please let the webmaster know by clicking on the "email the webmaster" at the bottom! We'll answer as soon as we can to the best of our knowledge, and we'll update this page.

Adding personal pictures
I have real pictures but no .gif or .jpg
I have some other music that I'd like to play on my tile
I know HTML, can I use it?
I don't know HTML too well but I have FrontPage (or another web authoring tool), can I use it?
I don't know HTML, I'd like to learn it

Adding personal pictures

Currently the Vidal's Mon Ami web site is operating in thrift mode and does not allow big items like large detailed pictures to be uploaded to the server. Pages would take forever for the pictures to come up. Around September (maybe before then) we hope to move it to a larger bandwidth location.
But all is not lost if you are trying to put a picture of your dog or your favorite project. You may have a professional web site elsewhere, or you may have some free web space that comes with your internet connection. You may have registered on MSN or other services that host pictures. If you have some digital pictures (.gif or .jpg) that you want to show on your tile, you can upload them to these other servers, and then point to them from your tile. Please follow the other servers' instruction to upload the pictures, then view the pictures in another browser window. Bring the mouse cursor over the image. Right click on the image and chose "properties". Then select the Address of the picture with right click "select all" on the text of the "http://" part, then right click "copy". Now you can go in the tile editor and paste that address in the "Top Right Picture URL:" or "In-Text Picture URL:" boxes. Click the Update button of the tile editor to make sure your changes get saved.

I have real pictures but no .gif or .jpg

The easiest solution for now is to ask your photograph to make a photo-CD when you develop your film. The CD will contain all the pictures in digital format, easy to put on the web. If the pictures are already developped but you still have the negatives, you photograph can still make the photo-CD. If you don't have the negatives, I think they can still scan the picture with their machines.
When the restaurant opens, we plan to offer you some help, for free, to get your pictures uploaded into our servers, and added to your tile.

I have some other music that I'd like to play on my tile

This music needs to be located on the web, for example alongside your personal pictures that you uploaded to a 3rd party server. Let's say that location is http://myserver/place/place/file.mid . What you can do is chose "none" for the tile option "Background music your Tile:" and then copy this HTML code

<embed src="http://myserver/place/place/file.mid" 
autostart=true hidden=true loop=true></EMBED>

and paste it into one of the big text areas "Additional Text Area:" or "Last Text Area:". The "embed" tag will be invisible, but will kick in the music. Make sure to put your own music path instead of the example http://myserver/place/place/file.mid. And of course click the Update button of the tile editor to make sure the changes get saved.

I know HTML, can I use it?

Yes of course! The safest places to use HTML tags are the big text areas "Additional Text Area:" or "Last Text Area:". HTML may work in some of the other fields, but be careful. You may mess up the editor page and make things stop working and end up with a garbled tile until the webmaster gets around to fix it.
Putting quotes or double quotes in some boxes can truncate the value or break the form. Also, using <textarea> tags in the big text boxes can make them upset. Use <Input> instead.
Other than that, just make sure to close all the tags you open, especially tables, and respect the nesting order of the tags: close them in reverse order of opening: <tag1> <tag2> <tag3> </tag3> </tag2> </tag1>. Have fun :-)

I don't know HTML too well but I have FrontPage (or another web authoring tool), can I use it?

To some extent yes you can use other web authoring tools. These softwares will help you prepare HTML, but then see the previous point about some kinds of HTML tags that can cause the editor to garble things up. Do not paste the whole HTML page into the text boxes, it's not likely to work and is not designed to work... Instead, open the new file generated by the authoring tool and pick the part you want, making sure to grab the closing tags to avoid interfering with the tile editor's own tags.
These other web tools are designed for more complicated but standard systems. Vidal's Mon Ami web editor is of a different kind and aims at being more accessible to the vast majority of people who didn't spend 20 years of their life in front of a computer.
It was tricky to be both simple and compatible with the beefy 3rd party editors. We chose to stay simple at the expense of the range of features.
If you are a pro with FrontPage and you have your own web servers, there is the option called "Advanced: Check this box to have people sent straight to your link above without seeing your stepping stone page aka Redirection Mode" designed especially for you. Your v-tile will forward traffic to your other site.

I don't know HTML, I'd like to learn it

HTML is very simple. No really. If it wasn't the Internet would not exist.
It's made of regular text with special commands sprinkled here and there called "tags". Tags allow you to show pictures, create jumps to other pages, make tables to present information, format text, play music...
For example to turn text in italics, first write your text, then put <i> </i> around it. Which gives you this.
To get bold, use <b> </b> which gives you this.
To get bold and italics, you can do either this <b> <i> TEXT </i> </b> or that <i> <b> TEXT </b> </i> , but you shouldn't mix things up like that <i> <b>TEXT </i> </b> as it is a bad nesting habit.
Lastly, another good useful "tag" is the font tag: <font color=green size=+3>the text</font> ... it's hard to invent it, but once you see it, it's easy to figure out how it works.
To see more HTML, put your mouse -here- and right click and chose "view source". A window will popup with all the HTML that makes this page. Give yourself 5 minutes to read through the gibberish and try to guess what things are for. The more you look at it, the quicker you will memorize what the HTML tutorials will tell you. To see what the HTML tags mean, click here.
Sometimes the source starts with several pages of blank space, making it look as if there was no source... don't be fooled by this trick, scroll to the good stuff and see how they coded the page.
To learn more click here!. In just 2 hours you can learn enough to understand what HTML is all about. Good luck!