Kaj_Sotala suggested here that some people may wish to add signatures to posts (i.e. top-level posts, not comments (hell no!)) to link to the author's homepage and such, and this idea was supported (poll). I suggested that we make such signatures into an official looking standard template, and this suggestion was upvoted. This post contains my design for such a template. The last time I learnt HTML was back in 2003 when I was about eleven, so this is probably bad code by modern standards, but I'm hoping that people will criticise until we have a version that looks good on all browsers.
Code (Improved by Dreaded_Anomaly):
<div style="background:#f7f7f8; display:table;">
<a href="/user/Your user name goes here/submitted/"><img style="float: left; margin: 5px;" src="URL of the image goes here" alt="Your name's posts" width="64" height="64" /></a>Text goes here (links entered as usual)
</div>
Which produces a signature like the one at the bottom of this post. To use the code in the article editor press the HTML button and enter it at the bottom of the page. (Note that having your image be 64*64 to begin with will mean that it doesn't need to be scaled. Scaling sometimes makes images look weird or pixelly.)
I suggest that everyone who uses such a signature writes about themselves in formally and in the third person. Think of an "About the Author" section on the dust-cover of a book. This will raise the status of the site by making it reminiscent of an edited publication.
Oscar Cunningham is a Mathematics student at Trinity College, Cambridge (UK). Interests include probability, decision theory, and Ultimate.
Would it be possible for whoever to did the design to also do the layout for this? The style can go in the main .css, otherwise it could interfere with any future layout tweaks of the site.
I like the idea, I just don't like the potential future work of having to go update N signatures when the main site styles are tweaked.