How to Contribute

At TeenPublish we do allow you to publish an article/blog on our main pages, but the content must be exceptionally written. We have a select group of writers and we receive lots of submissions, but only accept the ones we think are of quality content for our front page and categories. Not to worry, this isn’t a competition of any sorts, nor do we keep a set limit on our blogs. If you feel like you can write for us but aren’t sure of your caliber, go ahead and send us your article. We may even edit it for you if we really like the content., and if you have quality written submissions, they WILL get posted.

When you signup for an account at TeenPublish, you are set as an automatic contributor. From there, click the “Create a new article/blog” or the Dashboard link to see your options, and you can create & save your blogs/articles. The Dashboard is a fairly easy to understand system once you click around the menus a bit, it’s really self-explanatory. If you are still confused, go ahead and ask our members any questions you have.

Please read the entire section below (its a quick read) and it’s pretty much all you need to stay within the rules of TeenPublish!

Properly formatting your article
For new contributors - after submitting your article
Using “Read More”
Getting a Gravatar icon for yourself
For users higher than contributors, the added responsibilities
Choosing the right Tags/Categories
Language Rules

Don’t forget to read these two as well, as it helps with understanding more:

Get a feel of the look of the content

: Simple contribution and formatting options

To best get a feel of the way we format our content, take a look at our already-written blogs or even other blogs for examples. To place a new post, go to Posts -> Add New, and to properly format just use to the tools on the toolbar. We normally use Heading 3 for headings within the article, and Heading 4 for sub headings, a combination of bold, italic and underline to mark important parts. Make sure you click on “Show/Hide Kitchen sink, which is the right most button of the top toolbar (selected in the image to the left), as that opens up new formatting options which consists of the second toolbar.

For new posters we do not allow images to be added and uploaded for security reasons, however you may embed an outside image using the <img src=”url(the address of the picture)” title=”your image title”> HTML tag. If you want to upload your picture so badly, than you can always use tinypic.com and link to that. We recommend no more than 1-3 images for a regular post, depending on their sizes and length of the post, so use and place with proper prejudice.

Note regarding HTML: HTML is the simplest Web programming language to which you can learn the basics of in a few hours. It’s very similar to the way Myspace layout creation works. Don’t be daunted by the word HTML – just use the examples we give you. You don’t need to know HTML to post, but if you wish to learn it, it can be valuable to know in the future. For those of you new to HTML, you may refer to awesome tutorials at W3C, and HTMLDog. If you still don’t understand how to place an image via HTML, just place the URL of the image, and an optional caption for it near where you want the image to be placed, and we will take care of it.

If your status is promoted higher to “Author”, “Editor”, or more, then you can add images by clicking on “Add media”, and we do allow uploads up to a certain file size. At this time, we do not allow videos to be uploaded due to bandwidth concerns, however you can embed other videos from youtube, metacafe, etc. Uploading any vblogs on youtube and blogging a post with your embedded video about it here is a great way to tap into TeenPublish.

PLEASE add a proper title and Excerpt (summary or description) for EACH of your posts. If you do not write one we may not ever get to your article! Don’t be lazy, please help us with saving time by adding a proper title and excerpt! For more info on that, click here.

After you tap the “Post for Approval” button

Once you publish a post, your post will be queued for an administrator or staff member to review. If your post is something we feel will be a great contribution to TeenPublish, then we will add it to the front pages and categories. If your content needs some tweaking, we will freely discuss it with you before publishing. If we feel your post needs some work, we will discuss it with you, so make sure your proper email is set and TeenPublish is not in the spam list (we don’t send out random spam anyways). We are not here to deny any articles, we are here to actually allow you to freely express your creativity and maximize your potential. If you contain a blog elsewhere and wish to be a guest blogger, that’s great! Just contribute the same way till we get to know more about you & your writing which is usually by the end of the first blog. Inform us you are a guest blogger on the first line of the post.

The more quality articles/blogs you publish, we will eventually allow you more higher in rank, to where you can publish posts without even being checked for a queue. Advanced ranks will involve editor and administrative tasks.

Since all posts are reviewed prior to posting on the front end, we may fix any minor grammatical and punctuation errors to keep a professionalism to your posts. We encourage ANY content, regardless of controversialism or not , as we are about keeping openness in your articles. If you believe any of our editors have changed your posting in any way that changes the point of your article, then please send me, the site creator, an email from the contact page, and I will see to it your article gets published correctly.

If we see a big need for people wishing to submit their essays and college apps, then we will create a section or a forum just for that. Contact us in the contacts page with a request if you would like to see this feature.

Using the Read More in the right area

Teenpublish's read more link right after every post

Gravatar – A face or persona to the name

A Gravatar is what keeps a unique image that you place into it that resembles yourself or what you are into. When you first login, a default basic Gravatar is assigned, which you can change easily. Frankly, you can have any Gravatar image as long as it’s not in the R rated category, for the sake of younger readers. Gravatars are associated with your email and are stored globally, so if you post anywhere it will load the Gravatar. It makes it easier for people who are viewing your articles know who posted it and resembles a hint of your persona. It’s a great way to connect to people. You can get a Gravatar easily at Gravatar’s official website. It will associate your Gravatar automatically with the email you sign up with in the Gravatar website, so make sure it’s the same email you sign up with on TeenPublish as well.

Easy to configure Gravatar screen for setting up your personal image

Posting to the right Tags and Categories

Please make sure to post your articles/blogs to the best category and create the best tags possible. You can select multiple categories, add multiple tags or use existing tags. Please use these tags and categories to the best of your abilities as they are what categorizes your content, and allows more access for readers to separate it via categorizing and tagging. Please don’t spam your tags. Keep it reasonable. New! We’ve added an auto tagger to help users pick some tags based off of written content! After you write your article, scroll below till you get to “Click Tags” and “Suggested Tags”. For more information on this, click the link below.

Please view our article on Proper Auto Tagging

For users higher than contributor privileges

Add images to the post

When creating a new post and adding an image, make sure you add a caption and a title. This is doable by the menu options when you click on “Add media”. This is great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which brings more readers to your posts. After picking your image from another URL (recommended, as there are lot of them on flickr and image hosting sites), or uploading, then click on the “Insert into Post” after making your changes. Once you insert into post, in the Visual View of your WYSIWYG editor box, click on the image and you should see a popup image and a red cancel icon. Click on the popup image and it will display a whole menu of new options and an Advanced Settings tab. Here you can change the important “Edit Image Title” and “Edit Image Caption” sections if you haven’t before. I usually like to keep the Image Title and Image Caption same, so it’s just a copy and paste to each other.

More important image options and re-editing of your images by clicking on it in the Visual view

Please don’t keep the images too big. We are looking to see how amazing you write, so the pictures can be shrunk down to a better size which doesn’t take over the screen. For those of you using your own images or creating, please crop out or resize the size that you think needs adjusting. Unless your post resembles something interesting which requires a lot of pictures, for example, some sort of political sattire or cartoon, then a big image wouldn’t be an issue. Do what seems right and interesting for your article/blog and your good to go.

Preferably, any images you upload should be in this format, image-name-to-upload.gif , with dashes between each keyword. This results better in SEO practice as well. Keep the captions and titles concise as well, to the point, not overbearing.

For Editors

For all the Editors users, if you see a contributor who has placed an image that would needs a caption and the title, please do this step before publishing the article.

More important image settings can be edited, title, caption, alignment

When you log in as an editor, you will see if any unpublished articles that need your approval. Please find the time to go over them, make any changes that needed be, or to discuss with the contributor, and post them. That way all the work does not get laid down to one specific person, and we can keep this site with good posts by original and different users. A different set of eyes for reviewing and publishing the posts are better than the same set or one set!

Language

Please keep the profanity usage and bashing to a bare minimum, and none of the words are allowed that make people stop and stare if you were to utter it in the middle of the street. There are many other forms to express your emotions creatively, which is the effort we are trying to make here. Unfortunately, modern day society does not consider it professional to include the use of profanity when speaking and expressing one’s self, so we must establish this rule.

Write with a passion and it will be a great contribution to the site!