Help page

This is a draft for the help page on northern-indymedia.org - anyone can make suggestions or edit it

Northern Indymedia Help Page 2.0 – DRAFT

After starting this I found an old draft document that needs considering for merge with this at help page for new site

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Introduction

This page is here to help you get the best out of this website. We hope it will answer most of the questions you might have. If there’s something you still don’t understand when you’ve read all this, please help us to help you by letting us know. See the contact options on the Get Involved page.

As we continue to add new features to the website this page will need to be updated, so please do tell us if it seems incomplete.

The main ‘output’ of Northern Indymedia is written and recorded by you and published straight onto this website. We try to keep discussion about how our collective works off this site because it’s not interesting to most readers however, we do want other people to get involved. The Get Involved page tells you how to do that, and what tools we use to organise ourselves.

Registration and Logging In

(advantages and how to use – more here later)

  • You can publish under any name you want but if you impersonate a registered user by using their registered name, we can tell and won’t be impressed. This is one reason for registering – you can protect your own reputation. If you notice anyone trying to impersonate you, tell us.

There are three possible levels of anonymity for publishing on our site:

Not logged in, using a pseudonym Strongest anonymity If you want to come back and edit what you wrote later you can’t, because you can’t prove that it was you that wrote it
Logged in, using a pseumdonym Only you and the site administrators can see which user wrote what You can come back later and edit what you wrote
Logged in, publishing under your login name You can build up your reputation as a reliable news source You can come back later and edit what you wrote

Groups

Are you a collectivist or an individualist? :P
more later…

Overview of publishing

Whatever you want to publish, your starting point is to push the big ‘publish’ button insert button graphic in the top right corner of every page.

Publishing text

The written word has great strengths as a way of transmitting information. Compared to audio or video recordings, it is much easier to move around computer networks quickly. It can be read using the oldest and cheapest of computers, and can be translated automatically into other languages. It can be automatically turned into audible speech or Braille for the visually impaired. On this site, you can also attach multimedia content to your article using a single publishing form.

Start by pushing the ‘publish’ button then ‘publish an Article’ insert button graphic

We’ve tried to make the form as self-explanatory as possible, but here are a few tips:

  • The title is limited to 50 characters so that it will fit in the space available on the front page. It’s more readable it the first letter is a capital, but the rest of the punctuation is down to you. Don’t use all capital letters.
  • You can choose any name you want (see above).
  • Putting your email address in the box has the advantages that if you accidentally breach our editorial guidelines, we can contact you and ask you to make an amendment rather than just hiding your article. Also if you want to build a campaign, you want people to get in touch with you!
  • Try to put something in the location box that would allow people who live nearby to find your article if they want to know what’s going on in their locality. Check your spelling.
  • The summary is the text that gets displayed above any photos you might attach, or on the front page if it’s featured.
  • ‘Description’ is for the body of your article. If you want to compose your piece off-line, use a text-editor rather than a word-processor, and paste in the unformatted text using Ctrl-V. Put in your formatting and any hyperlinks after. If you want to check nothing’s gone wrong with your formatting, select the text in question and click the ‘clean up HTML’ button (a little broom in the bar above the text.)
  • ‘Allow additions’ should be ticked if other people will need to add further factual information to your story, for example, if you saw something happening in public and there were other witnesses to the same event. If you want your piece to stand alone, untick the box.
  • Tagging your article accurately allows people to search for articles on whatever topic you’re writing about. The tick-boxes are really just suggestions based on commonly reported themes – and to reduce the chances of spelling mistakes! Don’t forget that multi-word tags need to be separated by and underscore. For example if you tagged a story “middle_east” that would work but if you tagged it as “middle east” it would appear that you were writing about middles and easts.
  • If you want to upload an audio file, use the ‘add file upload’ option – everything else just does what it says
  • If you’re not logged in, you have to prove you’re not an automatic spam machine by typing the letters into the ‘no robots!’ box
  • Check the editorial guidelines if you haven’t already, then click create. If you’re uploading some big files, this could take a while, depending on how big they are and how fast your internet connection is. Be patient, and don’t shut down your browser, it hasn’t crashed (erm, probably…)

Tumbles: Uploading A Photo Or Video Straight From Your Phone

Videos

stand-alone Vs. embedded in an article
not linking to youtube

Events

How to promote, inspire, and write up afterwards

Zines

The joy of non-news

Other media

relevant to northern england
precis please

How promotion and featuring work, and what they mean

Glossary

…

pithy remark about DIY