How Do I Edit Content Successfully on this Web Site?

This confuses a lot of new users, and I'll try to go over the basics here. There should be more later on some other help pages.

When you go to edit a page on this site, you'll see a page that looks roughly like this (top of page only)

Top of a blog entry page on Uppity Wisconsin

You'll note that you can put in a title for the article, and that there is a selection box below the title where you can select categories. This is useful so that we can organize the web site based on topics, and people can find things that way as well. We'll be doing more with that in the future. In any case, select a topic from the list. You can select multiple topics by using the Control (or Apple) key on your keyboard while selecting.

After you've selected a title and a topic, you can enter the body of the article you're submitting. There are two ways to enter your text:

1. You can enter simple text directly into the web site, along with a few kinds of simple HTML editing.
   
2. You can select a "rich text" editor called TinyMCE to edit. This is much more like using a word processing program, but on the web. You'll notice that there is a small button below the editing box that lets you select the rich text editor or not. You can also set the default for this for your account on your account management page. (more on that in another article soon).

Most of you will likely want to use the TinyMCE editor if you're going to be doing any formatting of your article. I'll go through some of the more important options for that:

You'll note that the editor above has a lot of different buttons below it for formatting your input. There is a help popup for each of the buttons that will tell you briefly what it does, and give you a shortcut key you can type instead of clicking on the buttons. I'll go through a few of them that almost everyone will use at some time or another -

The big B button will bold any characters you've selected. You can select characters with the mouse, much like you would in a word processor. Likewise, the I button will italicize. The Link symbol lets you put links in an article - select the text you want to make a link, then click on the chain link symbol. A window will then pop up allowing you to put in the URL, etc. that you want to link to.

Pictures, you ask? Yes, you can insert pictures - that's a little more complicated. You can upload an image to the site and insert it using the little icon that looks like a camera. Select the place where you want to insert the picture, then click on the camera icon. After you do that, you'll get a fairly complicated dialog box that will let you upload an image, or select an image from ones you've already uploaded.

Img_assist window: This is the image assist window that lets you select or upload pictures. Note that in my case, I've already uploaded a lot of images. To upload your own, you need to click on the Upload button to create an image entry on the web site. Fill in the form you get, and then click on submit. That will upload the image to the site, and you will then be able to select it, and insert it into your article any of a number of ways.

At the bottom of the page, you'll find a preview button and a submit button. The preview button lets you see how the article will look formatted on the web site. Most article types on the site have a teaser portion that will appear on the front page, or any other teaser list - it's normally just the top part of the article. The rest of the article will appear if someone selectes read more at the bottom of the article. You can change where the break is for the bottom of the teaser, although in a lot of cases the editor will override what you do there anyway, so for the moment, just ignore that.