How to post stories to the site - Using the Post a Story Form

How to post stories to the site - The Form

There is no need to be signed in as an admin to the site. Anyone who has an account on the site can post a story. There are three ways to post stories to the site:

1. The ‘Post a Story’ form – a more manual way
   a. Have the story you want to post open in another tab
   b. On the application’s menu, mouse-over the ‘News’ menu item and click ‘Post a Story’
   c. This is the form you’ll use to post a story. “*” means the field is required
   d. On the tab with your site open in it, mouse-over the ‘News’ menu heading to display the news drop-down menu and click on ‘Post a Story’
   e. Go to the tab with the story you want to post and copy the URL

2. Main Tags
   a. On the tab with your site open in it, paste the URL in the ‘URL*’ field. When you tap your computer’s tab key or click on the title field, the application will automatically capture the title, caption, and return any images it thinks are related to the story.
   b. Check to make sure the title and caption are correct. The application assumes websites use a common schema for tagging their stories. For instance, if it can’t find the ‘title’ tag, then it will find what it thinks is most likely the title and use it. Same for the caption. If you aren’t satisfied with what the application grabs, then just go to the story and copy the text you want for the title and/or the caption fields and paste in to the form.
   c. The ‘Tags (comma separated)’ field helps the application organize the content and makes it easier for people to search for tags on the site.

For example, if the article is about the iPhone, these tags would be good: technology, iPhone, phone. This would show up for any search on ‘technology’ or ‘iphone’ or ‘phone’. In general the tags are the main subject areas that the story is related to.

Another way to use tags is to follow the site’s subject areas. Most people are familiar with how newspapers organize their content. For a baseball article the tags could be: sports, baseball, “team name”. Or: sports, baseball, “seattle mariners”, “felix hernandez”

Images/Video/Audio
It is good to have an associated picture with the article to grab the reader’s attention. The application will find pictures it thinks are related to the story once the URL has been entered in the ‘URL*’ field.

Images: To choose one of the images the application found, click on it or scroll left/right to find the best one. Once an image is clicked on, its URL will appear in the ‘Remote image url’ field

To upload an image, click on the ‘Browse…’ button and select one from your computer.

Video: Click the ‘Add video link’ to post the story with an accompanying video. At this time only YouTube videos are supported

You can either copy YouTube’s HTML embed code for the video and paste it in the ‘Embed code’ field, or copy YouTube’s URL for the video in the ‘Remote video url’ field.

Audio: Click on the ‘Add audio link’ to post the story with accompanying audio. At this time only .mp3 files are supported

The ‘Url’ field is the only field that is required, but it is good to also provide the Title, Album, and Artist fields as well to make it more interesting for the readers