Anarchist Writers

The only people who can publish blogs or articles to the site are people who I've given writer accounts to. A normal registered account enables you to post comments and see some additional site information (ie the number of reads for each article) but not to blog/post articles. If your interested in getting a writer account contact me with the URL's of 3 articles you've written.

For writers here is a very quick guide to publication
1. Click on 'Create Content' in the right hand column, this will give you 3 choices
a. Blog entry - this intended for chatty minor stuff rather than articles. Material posted here will not appear on the front page and will not appear in most article views. It will appear in the left hand 'Recent blog posts' column.
b. Forum topic - this appears only in the forum and so not at all on the front page. It's intended to ask technical questions about the site etc.
c. Story - this is for your articles, it may appear on the front page and will appear in your article index and all relevant views of the entire archive.

Experienced users of Drupal will be aware that there are number of other articles types possible, I've deactivated those for writers as they are just confusing unless you know what your doing.

Once you click on one of these buttons what you see next will vary a little according to which one it was. In particular 'story' gives a lot of classifications that are not available for the other types so casual blog posts for instance don't appear in the list of articles on imperialism or from the USA.

Here is what the sections refer to
a. Title
This obviously is the title your story will appear under in all archive views. Importantly it is also used to generate the URL that points to your story. So the title should contains words that are descriptive of the content. If you prefer to use artistic flouishes in titles I'd suggest you don't put them here but put a second title at the top of the story itself, that is at the top of the 'Body' box. Be aware that a lot of people are subscribed to the sites RSS feed so this means what they will see on their RSS reader of an article will be the title and summary and they will decide to click on it on that basis alone.

b. Classifications
Next are the classification fields. These will allow you and other users to rapidly find all articles you have written on a particular topic. Most are self explanatory. Note that those who do not start off with a shallow 'please choose' box allow you to put your article in more than one classification in the box that follows. To select more than one category hold down the [cmd] key as you click on each (this is for a mac, with windoze it will be one of the keys to the left of the space bar).
Writer - you obviously choose your own name here. At the time of writing this was the only way I could make the articles searchable by author as well as by the other classifications, hopefully in the future this step can be dropped.
Region - choose the region your article is about, not the region you are writing from (unless the two are the same)
Contains multimedia - choose these if the article includes links to PDF or video or if the images are significant rather than illustrative.
Article Index - It is possible to put anything in this box but don't! Instead only put relevant terms as listed at http://anarchism.pageabode.com/using-tags If a term is not listed there then add a comment asking it to be listed. This is important because although this 'free tagging' is important in creating interesting subject index's it will only be useful if all writers use the same tag to describe relevant articles.

c. Body
This is the text of your article. Note that while this can just be text if you know HTML or BBcode you can use this to dress up the article. In that case be sure to select the right code under the 'Input format' menu under body. If you don't know what any of these terms mean don't worry, by default you don't need to. If you want learn have a look at the Compose Tips link in the right hand column of the front for a detailed list of codes you can use to make your article all pretty.

Just over the right corner of the Body: box you'll see a button that says 'Split summary at cursor'. This is very useful and allows you to determine two things.
1 - where the summary that appears on the front page and in the archive will end
2 - whether the summary will appear in the article view itself.
Once you have 'split summary' a check box titled 'show summary in full view' will appear. If unchecked the summary will not appear so if you want to have an additional artistic title uncheck this and put that title at the top of the second box.

d. Input format
This is used to choose between possible ways of adding code to the article. Normally filtered HTML is the way to go. The HTML no linebreak exists for articles you are copying from the source code of other websites which might otherwise have lots of end of line characters inserted.

e. Images
This is used to control how images you have added to the article with 'File attachment' are displayed with the article.

f. File attachments
This is for adding images to your article to illustrate it. At the moment don't attach PDF, sound or video as all these will take up a lot of your storage space. To add an image first of all click 'Browse' and find it on your hard drive. Then click attach - you will see a progress bar as it uploads to the site. Once it has uploaded you can add a caption by changing what is in the description field (this will default to the actual name of the image file). You should uncheck the list box as this only provides a link to download the file from.

g. URL path setting
Don't touch this when first publishing an article but if you subsequently edit the title you should uncheck the automatic alias box before saving. The function of this part is to generate the URL that will link to the article.

Save and Preview are obvious, the first puts the article on the site, the second first shows you a preview of how it will look so you can spot errors. Obviously you should preview first and then save

Adding old articles
If you are adding a lot of old articles tell me when you have done so and I can set it so that they are not on the front page but still appear in all the archive views. This will prevent them driving your or other peoples current writing off the front page.