How to post an article....

Right underneath the Rochester Indymedia banner at the very top of the page you will see a row of links (home, features, newswire, media gallery, information, otherpress, links). And right below that are three other links (upload media, post an article, and link to otherpress). You want to click on "post an article".

After clicking that link, you'll be brought to another screen. This a standard form page with lots of fields for the creation of an article.

There are a few necessary fields and some that are not necessary. I'll go over the ones you need and you can feel free to experiment with the others.

Section: This tells the reader what kind of piece this is; is it news, commentary, an announcement, a review, or an interview? Select one of these.

Local Interest: Right next to the section box is a small checkable box with the words "Local interest to this site." Click this. It will put your announcement in the local newswire near the top of the homepage and allow others to quickly see your newly posted piece. The point of the box is to differentiate between local news and national or global news. So if you're posting something that has no real local tie, leave this unchecked.

Category: This is where you select the interests/issues that your article most closely affiliated with. In this case, I might select "war and peace" but feel free to connect it to whatever you like. You can select many, but all you need to select is one.

Author/contributor: Unless you create a user name for Rochester Indymedia, the author will default to "anonymous poster." You can sign up for a user name which keeps track of all your posts and allows you to go back and edit them.

To do this, click on the blue text that says "create new user." Enter a first name, user name, password, and email. Your last name is optional. The user name is what will appear for the authorship unless you change it.

Title: Select a title for your piece.

Body mime: All you need to worry about here is the large box where you will enter or copy and paste the text of the article you want to post.

Related URL: If you want folks to find out more, enter a url to another website here.

License: Feel free to select the one you like. You can copyright your work, leave it open to the public, or have some, but not all, rights reserved.

Slide your mouse over the icons in this section to see what they mean. You can find out more at creativecommons.org.

Anti-Spam: You must enter the number/letter combination in the purplish box into the white box right next to it. This tells us that the person who posted the article is not just a computer spamming our site with advertisements etc. If you do not enter this code, your article will not be posted.

There's a small check box right below the anti-spam filter for previewing the post before publishing it. If you have a user name, you will be allowed to preview the post and go back to re-edit if you need to. However, if you opt not to create a user name, you will be unable to go back and edit it or view it in this stage.

Submit! Finally, click the submit button.

Tada! :) You've just uploaded your article.