How to publish a story on The Clade

By Chris Clarke | Posted on April 10, 2009

A quick and dirty intro to getting your story up on The Clade

So you’re all signed up, and The Clade’s admins have approved your membership as a Contributor, and you’ve got a hard-hitting story on species extinction to publish. But how do you do it?

If it’s a very short piece, let’s say just a link to another post somewhere else, you can just go to The Clade’s Stand-Alone Entry Form and fill out the fields, hitting “publish” when you’re ready. But what if it’s a complex article with a number of outside links and such? Where do you go? What do you do?

You go to The Clade’s control panel page at http://theclade.faultline.org/admin.php, is where. 

If the page doesn’t open for you, you’re not properly logged in. If you are logged in, that URL will bring you here:

Where you’ll see an opening control panel page with a number of potentially confusing things on it. Take heart! You only need to pay attention to a few of them.

The first step is to click on the tab up toward the top that says “Publish.”

This will open the Publish Form, which looks like the one in the image immediately below. You’ll see a few smartly labeled text entry fields: Title, Intro, and Body being the ones you’ll be most interested in. Enter the post’s title in the Title field, the post’s first paragraph in the Intro field, and the remainder of the post in the Body field.

NOTE: It’s smart to compose longer posts in a text editor and paste them into the body field. In case of power failure or computer freeze or the sun flaring to red giant size, charring the Earth into a blasted rocky cinder of a former living thing, and thus closing your browser window before you can publish, you won’t lose too much text.

Also important: be sure to hit the return twice after each paragraph, so that the text in the Body field looks like it does in the example provided. This will ensure your post is formatted properly when it goes live.

Soon you’ll end up with a window full of filled in fields looking something like this:

Formatting Text

Hmm. It looks like a bit of emphasis on the word “this” in the last paragraph would make your intent a bit clearer. But emphasizing by PUTTING EMPHASIZED TEXT IN ALLCAPS is frowned on in environmental publishing, as it depletes our irreplaceable capital letter reserves, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. Think of the children! Fortunately, you can emphasize the word by making it bold, for instance, by selecting it and then hitting the bold button, labeled “<b>”:

That same technique will work for italicizing text (using the <i> button) and for formatting text as a block quote (using the <bq> button). How’s that text look now?

Excellent: the Content Management System has placed bold tags on either side of the selected text.

Now you can give yourself a link to another blog, if you’re crossposting your important story from your own blog. Down toward the bottom of the Publish Form are two little fields, “Crossposted From” and “Crosspost URL.” Fill them out with the name of your other site and the link to the same story on that site (you can put your main site address there if you wish, but if you’ve got a good conversation going in comments at your place our readers will likely be interested in a direct link. The fields should look something like this:

Making links

And then it strikes you: the blog world frowns on unsubstantiated rumors! Stating that the sun is going to swell to red giant size and incinerate the earth is a pretty serious allegation, and you’d do well to provide a link to some sort of corroborating information lest you be dismissed as some sort of alarmist. Fortunately, you have the perfect corroborating link.  Select some relevant text and hit the “Link” button, like so:

Up will pop a little popup window, asking you for the URL to which you want the text linked.

Type or paste the proper URL in the window:

Then hit “OK.” The pop-up will refresh and show you the linked text. Not a bad chance to review it:

Hit OK again, and it refreshes again, asking you for the “ALT” text for the link, which will show up as a “tooltip” in some browsers. It’s probably more helpful to disabled folks and others if you enter more descriptive information than this:

Adding tags

One last task before you publish, and that’s adding tags. Tags help readers find articles on certain topics: if you’ve used Flickr you’ve seen them. It’s a nice idea to add a few tags to your post and the software makes it easy. Just click the “Tags” tab atop the Publish Form, like so:

And the Tag Fields will appear at the top of the form, like so:

You can ask the software to suggest tags for your post, which will work better after people add a whole lot more tags for the software to choose from. For now, it’s probably faster just to enter a few carefully chosen tags yourself, with a return separating each tag as shown here:

And when you’re done, check everything over and click the “Submit” button:

You’re done! Go to The Clade’s site and see for yourself:

Oh, crap. You missed a typo. We’ll fix that for you in section 2, along with showing you how to put images in your post.