1 YOUR ARTICLE (OR SOURCE INTRODUCTION) MUST BE YOUR OWN WORK If submitting from another source, please do not copy/paste the whole article.  Pick and chose, at most, two paragraphs of the source material and add that to your story (your own work) (more on this see section 3).  An introduction should precede the two paragraphs that you are sharing from the source site.  When writing your article/introduction think why this is important to you - you may wish to share this, it is newsworthy as we are a news website, how it is relevant to current happenings, etc - old or out-of-date stories cannot not be submitted as new. There is no size restriction on the length of your introduction.  One or more of these could be in your introduction. Also, at the top of the editor, place your title to your story. This should not be a copy/paste of the original story line, make it different and be creative, as this will allow it to show up in search engines, whereas a copy/paste will not usually allow your story to show up.

If you are the author of an original story, that you also have posted on another site, please use the above guidelines, and treat it the same as using an outside source. 

2 GETTING YOUR ARTICLE READY FOR THE FRONTPAGE - AND THE WORLD Once you have your introduction in the editor, with the two paragraphs of the source article, you will need to insert a "read more" break directly between the second and third lines of your story.  This will allow the first two lines to appear on the front page and insert a link to the page your story will reside on for reading all of the material you post.  The way to put the "read more" break into your story is the button on the bottom of your editor window labeled "read more".  Place your cursor between lines two and three, then click on the button at the bottom.  This will insert a read line across the editor.  On the home page it will appear as "Read more--->>"  and will be a link.  Please keep all photos and videos below the "read more" break, as this keeps them from taking up too much room on the front page.

3 HOW TO CREATE A BLOCKQUOTE View the image below this shows an article that is ready to be submitted.

After you submit your article this is how it will look in blockquotes:

There is another way to confirm the source of your article .You can write your article in all your own words and insert links onto words from the sources where you found your information as you go along.

4 PICKING THE SECTION WHERE YOUR ARTICLE BELONGS Now scroll down past the editor window and you will see where more is needed.  Click on the drop down menu and pick the Section of the site for your story.

5 NOW PICK THE CATEGORY WHERE YOUR ARTICLE BELONGS. Next drop down menu is the category of your story, so pick which fits the topic of your story, by clicking on the drop down.

6 PUBLISH OPTION You now have the option to click the yes or no on publish your story.  For now, we would suggest to use the publish, as this is still in development. 

7 DO YOU WANT YOUR ARTICLE TO SHOW ON THE FRONTPAGE You now have the option to show your article on the frontpage or not.  This is up to you to pick which option you want for your story.

8 CHOOSE YOUR AUTHOR NAME. Now you have the field for author alias.  Here you would put what you want to appear on your story as the author.  This can be your real name, or member name and such. If you leave it blank your username will appear.

9 PUBLISH DATE The next two fields are the start publishing field, which has today's date and time in it.  If you want it to go live when you finish, simply leave that there.  If you want to publish it, say on Christmas Eve for a Christmas Day story, you can insert the Christmas eve date to publish.

10 Say that your Christmas story, mentioned above is only relevant for a few days, in the next field you would place the date and time you wanted to stop the publishing of your article. Under normal stories, this would simply be left blank to keep your story on the site and readable by members.

11 You next drop down menu is for access to your story, and you can pick any of the options.

12 The following drop down, if you click on it, lets you place where you would like your story to appear, in order of other stories already on the site.

13 Metadata is the next window that you will see. Here, you would put in a short description will key elements of what your story is about.  No one can see this, however, search engines can.

14 The next and last field you will see, is for keywords/tags.  Here you would post the words that are relevant to your story for the search engines to pick up.  This would be location, what keywords your story is about, and topics that your story may be about.

15 Once done with that, scroll back up to the top of the page and click on (save) on top of the editor window.  With that done, your story has been published.

16 There are also various buttons on the editor that you can work with, such as inserting images and page breaks, found on the bottom, as well as the numerous ones on the top of your main editor window.  Most are very basic.

 

17 A final note, any publisher is NOT to go into another's story and edit it in any way.  If there is a problem, contact the author via PM or contact an Administrator.