MyGiftedLife.org

The first requirement to submit an article is that you have the proper permissions.  The minimum user level to submit an article is "author".  This is protected primarily to prevent spam from attacking the site.  Just contact an administrator (e.g. iconoclast) to change your user level for you if you want to start submitting articles.  Then you'll have a link  in the main menu on the lefthand side of the site to submit articles.

One difference is visible at the bottom of the editor, the three special buttons labelled image, pagebreak and read more.  Each inserts the special thing it is named for.  The image button controls the selection of existing clipart within the site as well as links to external images and the ability to upload your own images.  This kind of empowerment of our members to post artwork and photos is one of the reasons why we must protect this ability from spammers. Please try to keep your images small and web-optimized.

The pagebreak button can insert pagebreaks into very long articles, but this can be a tricky thing to accomplish and is really only beneficial in the longest sort of articles.  Finally, the read more button is very important.  After the first section of your article, the "teaser" which encourages people to read more after you have described your article, you should insert a read more line to tell the site to break your article here.  Then continue writing.  The result is that the beginning of the article is shown, without the full article taking up the entire front page, but the rest of the article is available to your readers with one click of the "read more" button.

 The next section of the page is also important, because it determines how your article is published.  Don't worry, because until you are more familiar with the site, your author user permissions mean that your articles go into a queue to be reviewed to make sure the settings are correct.  If you don't find your category or section, you can leave the article uncategorized, and an administrator or editor will help you place it.

The publishing settings include:

• Section (usually Articles)
• Category (News, Site News, and more to be added)
• Published (should be yes)
• Front Page (usually yes, but some articles are for other parts of the site)
• Dates to start and stop publishing (the javascript calendar should help, but the default finish date should be "Never", and you can type that in.)
• Access Level:  should be Public, so that the Public can see your article.

The Metadata section can help your article be more widely read.  By putting a short description of your article in the description blank and adding a few well-chosen keywords (please don't repeat or spam keywords, as that might make Google upset with us), your article can be picked out and searched both on and off the site throughout the internet.

Once you're through writing your article (it might be even easier to paste it from a program like Word and then check to see if it looks right in the editor), you should save it using the button at the top marked "save".

If you have any problems, please let an administrator know.  This is a first draft of this help article, and there may be things that need to be added or explained further.  If so, please reply with a comment to help us improve the site.