SurvivalRing

How to Publish A Post on SurvivalRing

First, THANK YOU for joining the site, and for helping create useful content for our visitors.

What you’ll find below are several screen shots stepping you through the process of posting articles, reviews, and general content to our website. You are most welcome to create links within your posts, that help monetize your article, using Amazon.com and their affiliate program, or using text links to other affiliate programs you may be a member of.

If you choose to monetize your articles, PLEASE do so using words in context to your article, and not blatant commercial adds ONLY. As site owner, I do have the right to correct, suggest edits, or possibly remove articles that are off topic with what SurvivalRing offers.  Upon your adding a post to the site, I would appreciate an email before or directly after your posting so I can review it and make any minor adjustments needed.

With that said, please go through the tutorial below and see if it is explanatory enough. Please use the CONTACT ME page if you have questions, comments, or suggestions to make this tutorial better.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Write your article on your own computer before beginning the process of creating a new post. Please spell check it and have any images you need saved in JPG format, and no larger the 400 pixels wide. Suggestion sizes are 300 wide or less.
• Once you’ve got your article/review/story ready, open the article in your word processor and get ready to COPY and PASTE, from your computer, into the NEW POST page of this site.

NOTE: Content and screen grabs from Leon Pantenburg’s article posting on SurvivalRing on April 16th, 2010. Used with permission. Thanks, Leon, you are greatly appreciated for your help and great articles!

ADDING POSTS TO SURVIVALRING.ORG…

Click on the images to open the full size picture of the screen grab, so you can view the details.

STEP ONE:

You must be logged in to add a post to the Blog. Once you’re logged in, go to your PROFILE page, and you should see the MANAGEMENT portion of SurvivalRing. Select the POST > ADD NEW link to begin the process of adding your article.

What you see: This is the NEW POST page.

What to do: First, enter the title of your article. Use the keyword TIPS, SKILLS, REVIEW, etc. in your title at the beginning of the subject. Then, use the SNIPPET icon, circled in the image above, to create an outline in the article posting area (below the editor function buttons).

What it does: The TITLE/SUBJECT of your post is very important. This helps with the search engines (both on site, and services like GOOGLE) to find your content.

STEP TWO:

What you see: You’ll see this small window pop up when you click on the SNIPPET button from STEP ONE.

What to do: Select the ARTICLE OUTLINE BY LEON tab, and then click on the INSERT button in the lower right of the pop up.

What it does: This inserts the article template, to help place your content in the right order.

STEP THREE:

What you see: Notice that the Outline is present in the CONTENT Box (the background matches what you would see on the actual web page).

What to do: Notice that each section has a BOLDED text, that tells you what is expected in each section.   The section sits between the two asterisks ( * ). The description of what is needed is between the brackets [  ].  The next line is the actual content that will be displayed once the PUBLISH button is pushed. After editing is complete, the only portion that should remain is the ACTUAL CONTENT part of your section of your post.

What it does: Completes the first part of actual POST creation.

STEP FOUR:

What you see: The next step is to create a starting paragraph that introduces the core subject of your post.

What to do: Highlight the text, and then select FONT SIZE, and then 14 point from the drop down menu. Also, select the “I” from the icons, (right next to the “B” button), to ITALICIZE the paragraph.

What it does: Makes the introductory text VERY obvious to the reader, so he can scan it quickly and see if it’s a topic of interest worth reading all the way through.

STEP FIVE:

What you see: The article content has been pasted into the next section.

What to do: Select the ARTICLE CONTENT and [ENTER CONTENT AND GRAPHICS HERE] text with your mouse, and PASTE in your article. In this example, the article contents have been PASTED in directly from Leon’s blog at www.survivalsense.com .

What it does: This gives us the text/code needed to begin tweaking to match the rest of the website.

STEP SIX:

What you see: A picture pasted into the article, as shown after pasting full article from Leon’s blog site.

What to do: Click on the image shown. This selects the image to allow us to make changes to how it’s displayed. Notice the wide open area to the right of the image. Not ascetically pleasing…yet.

What it does: We’re going to wrap the text around it to give the page balance.

STEP SEVEN:

What you see: The location of the EDIT IMAGE button

What to do: Click on that button.

What it does: This opens the pop up window so we can make a few code changes to make the image align with the text better.

STEP EIGHT:

What you see: This is the pop up window you’ll see after clicking on the EDIT IMAGE button above.

What to do: Notice the two circles in the image above. Click on the ALIGNMENT dropdown, and select either LEFT or RIGHT. I prefer that the first image is LEFT, next image is RIGHT, and so forth.  Set the VERTICAL and HORIZONTAL space values to 15 pixels, and set the BORDER to 1 (one) pixel.

What it does: Notice the small text box to the right of the circles. This gives you an idea of how the text will wrap the image once you’re done and click on the UPDATE button

STEP NINE:

What you see: What you’ll see after you hit the INSERT button. The pop up window will close, and you’ll see what the image alignment now looks like.

What to do: This is the preferred way to deal with images within a story/article/post.

What it does: N/A

STEP TEN:

What you see: After aligning the image, the next step only applies if you have or need a caption for the image.

What to do: Type in your caption text, or if it is already in your article, use your mouse to highlight the text. Next, click on the QUOTES icon button in image two above. Repeat this process for each image in your article.

What it does: This will place the caption text in a nice pull-quote box directly to the left or right of the image, connecting the two together visually. See the result in the second image above.

STEP ELEVEN:

What you see: The CATEGORIES selection area are on the right side of the NEW POST page.

What to do: Select the most appropriate categories that fit your article. Please limit your choices to no more than 6. If you see a need to add a new category, please contact Rich first.

What it does: CATEGORIES are very important for both site visitors, and search engines, to be able to find specific informational keywords to content on our website.

STEP TWELVE

What you see: Right side of page is the blue button to PUBLISH or UPDATE your article. Your article will not be seen by visitors until you have published by clicking on the button. Top Left of image is where you’ll see a link to view your page that has now been published/updated.

What to do: Make sure your article is complete, spell checked, and ready, before clicking on the publish button. If you need more than one visit to the site to complete the article, please use the SAVE AS DRAFT link until you are finished.

What it does: Upon completion of editing and publishing, your new article is added to the front page as the latest new post. Note that the first two posts on the home page are STICKY, meaning they MUST remain in that location for the sake of new site visitors. Your article will appear directly below them.

STEP THIRTEEN:

You are now done! You’ve created a new post, edited it, used some tool bar editing functions to speed up the process, and the new post fits into the rest of the website without you having to know anything about web design. Congratulations, and thank you for becoming a contributor to the SurvivalRing website, one of the leading personal preparedness and survival websites on the internet today, serving information since 1997.

Questions? Comments? Ideas?  Please contact Rich to share your thoughts.