Qualification
You need to have submitted at least a couple of articles by email here. Send me an email requesting a profile. Once you’ve received your user details you can login at the bottom right of the site.
Completing your posts
The post editor is very simple with Word like icons/buttons for functions such as italicising or emphasising text, it has two modes, ‘visual’ where what you see is what will be published and a ‘text’ mode where you can see the underlying code (WordPress’s version of html). Keep it clean, check the ‘text’ version before submitting to me. Currently you cannot add your own media (pictures) as a ‘contributor’ so for the moment you will need to email me your pictures and I will place them in your article. You should indicate in your article where you want the pictures to go using placeholders ie Pic 01, 02 etc, or the file name. When you’re ready set your article to ‘pending review‘, you can add posts but not publish/schedule them, that’s my job.
There are many sources for copyright free pictures, please use them. I have listed a few below but there are many more, add your suggestions in the comments and I will update the list.
- Flickr
- Wikipedia
- Pixabay
Edit the image sizes before sending them to me, they should be 1030px on the longest side, use the original file name/attribution, or if they are your own images please name them. Once I have received them I will insert them into your post and you can place them as you wish and add captions if wanted.
You should select from the existing categories, always select the top level category if you select one of its sub-categories. I would rather you did not add new ones. However, feel free to add tags. Below the post editor there are SEO options, the only one you should touch is the second item, description, if you can come up with a 160 character precis containing key words and phrases it will help search engines find your article more easily. If you are an author your post will automatically appear under your name, additionally add your name as a ‘tag’.
There is a plugin installed for creating tables, one to chart data and one to do math formulae called MathJax. Email me if you want to use MathJax. If you think you need more options/functionality you can always search for WordPress plugins and suggest your own but always give me a description of what you want to do. There may be reasons I’m not able to use particular widgets and there are usually more than one that will do the same thing.
If you’re emailing me please put your post title in the subject and what you want me to do ie “IMAGES – your post title“, “SCHEDULE – your post title“, it will help me deal with the email I receive.
Lastly, if you’re stuck email me.
Updated June 8th 2018