First thing you need to do is join the Vocab Collab community so you can publish your joints online! If you haven’t done that yet, join now, its free!

So now that you have an account, you can login and add comments to other user’s published rhymes. To start publishing yourself, you will need to download the authoring application called Phloneme. If you haven’t got that yet, download it here:

After downloading the Phloneme application, follow the instructions on the download page to install.

First we will get an overview of the Phloneme application.
Then, to get started publishing your first rhyme, we will step through the whole process. We’ll write, and throw up a simple “Hello World” joint! Don’t worry, after we throw it up on Vocab Collab, we’ll take it right back down again to show you how that works as well. Ready?

Phloneme

Open the Phloneme application.

After opening, the application will have already started an unsaved file for you.

First, lets set our authoring profile so our information is attached to our joints. Choose the “Preferences” option from the “Edit” menu, at “Edit->Preferences…”. Now enter in your information, your First Name, Last Name, AKAs (Which should be a comma-separated list of aliases), Crew, and optionally Email & URL. Don’t worry, your email will not be published along with your rhymes. Now click on the “Vocab Collab” label. Enter your username and password you registered with on Vocab Collab. Now you are done, close the Preferences window.

Now, lets look at the main components of the window.
At the top is the toolbar. Along the left are file operations that are fairly common, and work like other applications.

Towards the center of the toolbar, things start to get more interesting. There is a set of three toolbar buttons having to do with rhymes. They are “Rhymes”, “New Rhyme”, and “Clear Rhyme”.

“Rhymes” Action

The “Rhymes” action, will mark the currently selected word or set of words as rhyming with the current “Active Rhyme”. The “Active Rhyme” is the current rhyme set that is active. This is designated by a unique color and symbol. You can easily tell which rhyme set is the “Active Rhyme” by glancing at the indicator at the far right of the toolbar.
After triggering the “Rhymes” action on a selection, that selection will now take on the “Active Rhyme” color and symbol indicator.

By selecting another word or set of words, and triggering the “Rhymes” action, that selection will now be marked as rhyming with with your previous selection.

“New Rhyme” Action

So now say that you have a whole new set of lines that have a different rhyme. This is where the “New Rhyme” action comes into play. By triggering the “New Rhyme” action, a brand new rhyme set will be created and set as the “Active Rhyme”. You can confirm this by glancing again at the “Active Rhyme” indicator, and you will see a different color and symbol that will get applied to new selections marked as “Rhymes”.

“Clear Rhyme” Action

If you accidentally marked a word or set of words as rhyming and they didn’t. Just select that word or set of words, and trigger the “Clear Rhyme” selection and it will unset that rhyme designation.

Next we have the “Search”, and “Throw it up!” toolbar buttons, and the “Active Rhyme” indicator.

“Search”

This is one way of accessing a very important feature of the Phloneme and Vocab Collab integration. This will open a window just for the purpose of searching Vocab Collab for rhyming words or phrases!

“Throw it up!”

This is how we will publish, or throw our rhymes up online to Vocab Collab!

“Active Rhyme” Indicator

We have talked about this. This will let you know the current active rhyme set. By clicking on a rhyme in your joint, the rhyme set of that word or set of words will become the “Active Rhyme”. You will be able to confirm this by taking note of the change of the color and symbol indicators of the “Active Rhyme” indicator.

In the left-hand column of window under the toolbar, there is a collapsable area split into two different segments. The top segment is the “Open File List”, and below that is the “Quick Search” widget.

“Open File List”

This will contain the files that you currently have open to edit. To change the selection of the active file to edit, simply click on the name of the file in the list.

“Quick Search”

This contains the same functionality as the “Search” window. However, this widget will not show the entire joint from a match to your query. It will only show the rhyming words. Why is this repeated here? This helps to provide a more seamless experience in searching Vocab Collab, and integrating the results with your own work! Just copy and paste a rhyming word or phrase that you are interested in, into your own joint! And when you throw your joint up online to Vocab Collab, the attribution will already be taken care of for you!

Now we’re getting into the main area of the application where you flex your vocab skills! The main “Joint Editor”.

“Joint Editor”

The single-line input field with the greyed out “Enter Title” inside of it is where you enter the title for your joint.
The large multi-line input area below that is the “Body” field where you write your rhyme!

You Got The Vocab? I Got The Vocab!

Lets do a “Hello World” joint!

Title

Click inside the “Enter Title” field, and enter “Hello World!”. Now before we get too far, save your joint by clicking the “Save” toolbar button. Choose a location and name for your file.

Line 1

Next, click inside of the “Body” field, and type:

Now select the word “joint”, and click the “Rhymes” toolbar button.

Line 2

Now click after the exclamation point of the first line, so that the selection caret is at the end of the line. Hit “Return” or “Enter” now on your keyboard to start a new line. Now enter the line:

Now select the word “point”, and click the “Rhymes” toolbar button. You now have successfully marked two words as rhyming!!

Line 3

Start a new line. And type:

Now select the word “this” at the end of the line, and click the “Rhymes” button. Hold up, wait a minute! That doesn’t rhyme with “joint” and “point” punk!

Select the word “this” again. Now click the “Clear Rhyme” toolbar button. There, thats taken care of now.

Now click the “New Rhyme” toolbar button. You’ve started a new “Rhyme Set”, and it is now the “Active Rhyme”!

Select the word “this” one more time. Now click the “Rhymes” toolbar button again. This word is now part of the new “Rhyme Set”.

Line 4

Start a new line and type:

Now select the word “abyss” and click the “Rhymes” toolbar button. You’ve now created your second set of words as rhyming.

Throw it up!

Before we publish our rhymes, we should save the work we have done so far. Click the “Save” toolbar button, or choose “Save” from the menu bar, File->Save. Now, to throw our joint online to Vocab Collab, click the “Throw it up!” button.

In the dialog box that comes up, enter your username and password that you registered to use for Vocab Collab. (This may already be pre-filled for you from the Preferences panel) Now choose the Creative Commons license that you would like publish your writing with, then click the “Publish Now” button.

Once you have done this, visit the homepage of Vocab Collab. You will now see your joint published online.

Take it down

Okay, you may not want this lame rhyme on the world wide web in your name. So lets take this sucker back down. Select the menu option at “Edit->Take it down”. Once you have done this, your joint is now no longer on Vocab Collab!

Now you have gone through a quick end-to-end with Phloneme and Vocab Collab. Start writin’!