Great opening question, thank you for posting @myrmepropagandist . I’ve often looked at the journal section and thought about using it, as it seems to be a potentially useful resource that I’m wasting. I’ve never quite pinned down what I’d use it for though. I wondered about field trip overviews, but other than always being so busy afterwards with photos and individual observations, I thought I might just end up with a useless collection of weather reports.
There are some great examples here though of how others use their journals. I’m particularly drawn to the idea of using it for ID tips. There are certain pairs of species that I don’t see often enough to remember the differences and so I find myself revisiting the same pages of my guide books. Perhaps if I used the journal to make my own guides to these based on my own photos the information might stick a bit better.
Another idea might be to use it for site guides. I’m not quite sure how it would work though as once you’ve visited a place, you know it. It seems that would work best if there was a network of people sharing their guides with each other.
On the iNaturalist web site in general, anywhere you can use HTML, you can use Markdown instead (and vice versa). Only a subset of HTML is supported, but that subset lets you use the two markup languages pretty much interchangeably. For example, you can use Markdown in a paragraph of simple text followed by a table in HTML.
I didn’t know I could do that, and I will try! Yes, that looks like it would be way simpler for text formatting. Thank you. I was basically following the formatting instructions I found in an old how-to post on the forum, which only talk about HTML I think.
