Neno's Place - A Community of Reality FAQ

This article aims to answer the burning question of, "How can I write a good article that follows a standard here at Nenosplace.com?" I'll forewarn you now - This article will be rather extensive, but it should serve as the definitive guide. This being a new system - one that most of us are unfamiliar with - we're going to put in some stringent requirements at first. As we all get more and more comfortable with what to do with posting Articles, the rules will be let up a bit. That said, for now, the following is what is required to post an article: 1. When you are on the Articles page (The "Home" button), you can create an article right there. You do not have to be in the section/category where the article will ultimately end up in. You select that criteria later. So for now, just click on the "Create New Article" button in the top-right section of the page. 2. On the Article creation page, give it a good title. Making it the title of the article itself is always perfectly acceptable. If the title is gibberish, or makes little sense, please edit that title to something that makes more sense. 3. The SEO Url Alias should auto-fill itself. Please let it be whatever the system assigns it to be. For those that don't know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, optimizing the value of Nenosplace.com within sites like Google.com, and Bing.com - Giving it an increased site ranking. So leave this field auto-populated with whatever the system creates. 4. Tags - This is initially set to "None". Tags are essentially Keywords. Click on the "Tag" icon to open up the pop-up window that appears, and give your article some good tags. This aids in searches - Mainly within the site itself. Never post an article that doesn't have any tags applied to it, if you can at all help it. 5. Article Content. This is where we really are setting down some rules. One must think differently here. We are not creating forum threads, we are creating articles. Because of that, the rules that apply to forum threads don't translate well here to the Article world. Here are some pointers: - Do not mess with font sizes at all. For now, leave the default font sizes as they are. That means if you are copying a post over from the forum section, you'll need to remove all the size tags. A pain? Yup. But please bear with us on this matter. Our goal is to create a consistent look and feel within the Article section of this site. - Do not use Quote tags. It screws up formatting, and doesn't look that good. If you must somehow separate a piece of content from the rest of the article, try to use a combination of font coloring, and italics. Or bold that section. You have options - Just please refrain from using quotes. - There is a new icon/feature here within articles. When you are creating an article, above the message box, there are three rows of icons which manipulate the look and feel of your article. The last icon on the bottom row is called the PREVIEW Break. If you do not use a PREVIEW break in your article, the preview that shows up on the Articles page shows only about 8-10 words or so, and then provides the ellipses (...) to signify that there is more to the article. Want to show more than 8-10 words? Find a good spot where you want your preview to end, and place your cursor there. Then click on the PREVIEW Break icon. It will put in the BBCode of PREBREAK (contained within brackets). It'll actually have an open tag and then a closing tag. NOTHING GOES IN BETWEEN THE TWO TAGS. It'll look weird, but trust me, that's how this works. Play around with this - Place the tags in various places. You can always edit your own articles. 6. Now that the article content is completed, we need to focus our attention to the right side (because attachments is pretty self-explanatory), titled Publishing Options. First, you want to set the "Published" option to "Yes". If it is set to "No", then no one will ever see it, except admin/mod types. The Publish Date should be set to today, unless you really want to create an article to be published at a later date. The Publish Time will be pre-filled - Leave this option alone. 7. And let's look at the rest of the settings. Keep the default settings as they are, but make the following changes: Display Updated Date - Set to "YES". Display Pageviews - Set to "YES". Show Ratings - Set to "YES". 8. The Section - Set that appropriately. By and large, most of what you post here will reside in the Iraq News section. There will be exceptions, of course, but 90% of the time, the section will be Iraq News that you should select here. 9. The single most important setting to set here is the CATEGORY. This is a MUST. The categories match the categories that are in the forum, plus a few others that go with the other sections. You can set an article to multiple categories, but try to use that option sparingly. By and large, keep it to one section. Only in cases where it makes 100% obvious sense can you assign one article to two or more categories. 10. Now the FUN stuff (if you're a geek like me). The Metadata Information is important for search engines. These three little fields are what will make your article increase it's chances of being placed highly within a search engine. Here is what you do for the three fields - HTML