HOW TO CONTRIBUTE ARTICLES - A Brief Guide + A Note About Internet Browsers

A brief guide that helps you to use this site to publish your news, stories, events, images, videos and more!

This is a guide to help you publish articles on Bristol Indymedia. Before you start, here is a few things you may be interested to know about publishing on this site:

It's free! We don't charge for publishing a story. We don't take money to promote stories. We are an ad-free, non-commercial project.

You don't need permission from us to publish - just click on publish and fill in the form!

We don't publish the information, we provide the means for you to do it. (So please don't email up stories and press releases, jut read on and learn how you can publish!)

You need to stick to the Editorial Guidelines. They explain what is and is not allowed on the site. They are there to enable people-power media to work. However, they are not set-in-stone; if you don't agree with them, then get involved and help shape the project!

Events for the calender are done the same way as a story, but you change the 'Story Type' to 'Event' (it's all explained below!)

There is a help guide, especially for information about multimedia files and attachments and general site information., including a step-by-step walk through of how to complete the 'publish' form that will get your story online.

Please also see our good article guide for more information about the best way to get your information across to readers.

Bristol Indymedia works best with the Firefox Browser which can be downloaded for free here. If you are using a very old Internet Explorer browser you may experience problems on a wide range of websites. Having more than one browser will increase your usability of all websites.

Once you are ready to publish an article or event;

STEP 0 : OPEN THE FORM

Click on the 'Submit An Article' button in the top right hand corner. To view the article submission form while reading this guide, open this link in a new window: publish your news.

STEP 1 : FILE UPLOADS

You only need to pay attention to this section if you have pictures / documents to add to your article. Otherwise you can ignore it and skip to STEP 2.

If you do have extra pictures / documents to add to your article, first choose the number of uploads you have by clicking the arrow in the numbered box. Then click on the 'Upload Your Files' button. This will take you to a new version of the form, with all your file uploads ready to be made at the end of the form.

If you are not familiar with how to upload files at this stage, you need to make yourself more familiar with this basic function, familiar to all websites.

In short, your file needs to be ready to upload, either on your desktop, or another folder on your computer. By clicking 'Browse' button, a box will pop up allowing you to select the file on your computer. Click on the file you want to upload, then click 'Open'. The file will appear in the 'File to upload' box on the article submission form. Then, below, enter a caption to tell people about what the file is and other helpful information about it.

Note: There is more information on files, types and sizes in our help guide on Uploading & Creating Image, Video, Document and Audio Files.

STEP 2 : STORY CONTENT

You must give your article a title, story summary and contents (the main body of the story). A subtitle and additional text are optional.

Note 1: You must give a name for your article. This can be anything you like. You don't have to use your real name, though using a consistent alias may help in discussions and establish trust in your stories. It is up to you how much you want to tell people. If you are running a charity, then giving your name is pretty helpful, but if your story is exposing your employer's dodgy practices, then you might want to use a fake name.

Note 2: If there are web links in your story, please write them out in full, with the 'http://' on e.g. for Bristol Indymedia, 'http://www.bristol.indymedia.org' - that way the system will recognise they are a link and make the link active for you so readers can click on them.

Note 3: You can then add up to 3 embedded video links, i.e. add video files from sites such as YouTube or Blip.tv to be played in your story. See our Guide to Embedded Video for more information.

STEP 3 : CATEGORISE YOUR STORY

These boxes must be completed so as to categorise your story for future reference. Click on the arrows in the Story Type, Story Region, Story Topic and Story Language boxes and click on the option which most suits your article.

Note: If you wish to post an event, this is done in the same way as a story, but change the 'Story Type' to 'Event' - this automatically opens some date boxes below the type for you to give the date. This will mean the story is automatically posted on the left 'Calendar' when the date for your event comes around and straight away will be posted on the 'New Events' list. For events, make sure you have posted in the content of the story all the information people need to know; date, time, cost (if any) location (including full address) and information on how to get there, disabled access etc.

STEP 4 : AUTHOR DETAILS

You may (if you wish) provide contact information for your article. It is up to you how much you want to tell people. If you are running a charity, then giving contact information is pretty helpful, but if your story is exposing your dodgy practices, then you might not want to!

STEP 6 : TERMS AND CONDITIONS

There are a number of terms and conditions for publishing on the site related to open content and copyleft; making sure that what is published on the site is open for all to read and re-use in a non-commercial way. You need to read these and tick the 'Accept Terms And Conditions' box to be able to publish on the site.

Also if you have added files to be uploaded, you can use the buttons 'Validate Fields' to check the files sizes are OK and 'Image Dimensions' to check the images are not to big before you publish. For more on audio/video/image and document uploads see our help guide.

Also for Anti-Spam you need to enter the digits shown, for example: 'one six eight' as numbers in the box to the right, so for example here it would be: '168'.

STEP 7 : PREVIEW BEFORE PUBLISHING

Once you have completed the above steps, click the 'Preview Before Publishing' button at the bottom of the article submission form. This will take you to a page where you see how your article will look; from here you can either edit your article again in case you have made any mistakes (Click on the 'Edit Again' link), or approve it for publication (click on the 'Confirm and Publish' button.)

THE 'EDIT AGAIN' OR 'CONFIRM AND PUBLISH!' BUTTONS ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FINAL PAGE!

Note: If you do not click the final 'Publish!' button, after clicking the 'Preview Before Publishing' button your article will not be submitted. If you have done everything correctly your article will immediately appear on the right hand newswire on our home page. If your article does not immediately appear on the newswire it will most likely be because you did not click the final 'Publish!' button.