Columns
Our regular columnists provide most of Ethos’ original content. This page provides instructions for columnists on posting and managing your own essays.To begin, please sign into your profile. Once you are signed in, you will see the Dashboard tab and window with information from WordPress.
Note that there are a number of other tabs next to this tab. These are:
- Write (write and publish your column…)
- Manage (view other columns, and manage your own…)
- Comments (manage reader comments on your column…)
- Profile (information about yourself…)
Please familiarize yourself with these options, and fill out your profile information.
You are now ready to post your first column directly into Ethos! To do so, simply choose the Write tab. Then follow these steps.
- Give your post a title.
- Write your column.
- Choose at least two categories on the right, e.g. ‘ethics’ and ’social justice’ .
- Then Save (as a draft) or Publish (to go live)!
There are a variety of other options. The most useful are the text formatting options. Use whatever best conveys your content. In the interests of a consistent and attractive presentation, however, here are some simple rules.
Titles. Write your title followed by a space and in parens, by Your Name. Do not include punctuation after the parens. For example:
Exterminating Coyotes Helps Preserve Native Biodiversity (by Camilla Fox)
Paragraphs. Write in block paragraph style, and do not use first line indents. A hint here. When you write through the web interface of WordPress, you are writing xhtml code under the hood. That is how browsers know what and how to display texts, graphics, etc. In this case, hitting the Enter key once creates a paragraph break with a single line space. Just what you need to write in block paragraphs! If you want a line-break without a line space, use a Shift-Enter combination. Also, don’t be surprised if I adjust your formatting now and then. For most of us it takes time to get settled into a blogging mode of writing.
Coding. If you think you are going to format beyond block paragraphs with an occasional bold, italic or underlined word (like this page does!), then you will want to learn basic xhtml coding. Here is an excellent online tutorial by the very people who brought us the web, www.w3schools.com.
Ethics. Mention ethics, practical ethics, animal ethics, environmental ethics, or…you get the idea…in your column. This can be as simple as using the word once, or structuring an entire post around an ethical concept. The point is to unpack the normative content of your writing in a way that makes ethics manifest to an intelligent layperson.
Word Processors. Avoid them, and never cut and paste your text from the native file of a word processor like MS Word or Wordperfect. Doing so introduces junk code into your post. Some of this junk you might see, while some will be invisible. All of it will make your blog unreadable and your life miserable.
Text Editor. Instead of a word processor, you first option is to use a text editor. Your computer comes with a pre-installed text editor (e.g. TextEdit for OS X, Wordpad for Windows). I’m especially fond of NotePad++ as it is free, stable and comes in OSX, Linux and Windows flavours: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm.
Here are a few hints if you use a text editor.
- Leave out all formating except block paragraphs as you compose.
- Save your post as a text file (.txt or equivalent).
- Sign-in to Ethos, and navigate to a new blog post.
- Copy your text from the file and paste it into the blog post box.
- Format your post with italics, bold, underline, links, etc. through the web interface.
- Save or Publish!
Blog Editors. Another option that is a step-up from using a text editor and web interface, is using a blog editor (sometimes called a ‘weblog client’). Blog editors function like the email applications Eudora, Mail, Outlook, or Thunderbird. You write and format your post in the blog editor, connect to the internet, then upload your post. Its basically the same process as sending email. Using a blog editor also gives you the freedom to fully compose columns off-line, and then post them when you are ready. Most of us who blog on a regular basis use a blog editor.
You can find a range of blog editors for Apple, Linux, and Windows at http://codex.wordpress.org/Weblog_Client. Many are free. I am fond of MarsEdit for Apple, and Zoundry Raven for Windows.
Images. Alongside the quality of our thinking, the aesthetics of Ethos is one reason people keep visiting us. So please choose and position your images with great care. We are better served by leaving a photo out, than putting up a poor one. Loading images with your post can also be a complicated as you need to scale and position your images properly in order to maintain the aesthetics of the blog.
Before you start to upload and use images, here are a few requirements to keep in mind.
- The image should be integral to the article, visually stimulating and meaningful.
- Images should be of high quality, and in gif or jpg or png format.
- Crop images to extract unnecessary white-space, get rid of borders, etc.
- Images inset to the right or left of your text should be no larger than 200 pixels wide.
- Images intended to fill the blog from right to left should be centred and no larger than 500 pixels.
- Do not use borders of any kind around the image.
- Positioning your image to the right and top generally works best. Include a 10 pixel horizontal space to prevent the text from running into image.
- Aesthetics rule. If your image is better set along the top, in the middle of the post, or you have several images to include, do it as long as it looks beautiful!
You can read more about posting images in blogs at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Images. WordPress is an open source blogging platform. As part of its documentation, WordPress has a substantial ‘codex’ — a set of continually updated help files and instructions — available at http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons.
This should be enough to get you started. Enjoy!
Bill Lynn
William Lynn :: Jun.13.2007 :: Ethics ::