How to Contribute
Hello.
This is the start of an area dedicated to resources and guidelines developed to help you participate in LiveArchives. This site is still in a fairly early beta stage so should be developing and extending fairly rapidly over the next few months. Therefore we ask that you be as forgiving as possible with regards to any hiccups/glitches and be vigilant in letting us know about them. For now, report any site issues on Mike Fallows’ profile post.
This site is designed to be a fully collaborative project, so we will be happy to hear of any helpful suggestions, and look forward to your contributions.
You can already contribute to any entry that has comments open, and we encourage you to do so. However, if you wish to submit and archive your own entries you’ll have to do a little more.
We ask that you read these brief guidelines before submitting an entry to LiveArchives.
Please note that we have temporarily suspended new registrations via the LiveArchives site. If you would like to get involved with this project please contact Paul Stapleton: pauljstapleton [at] gmail [dot] com
First things first!
Initially you will need to register with the site and provide some basic details such as an email address and username. This will help keep all your submissions associated with you and make it much easier to maintain.
Creating your first entry.
Whatever you choose as your first entry is up to you, but we suggest you start with a personal profile of yourself (or a group/organisation that you are associated with) as it’s as good a place as any to begin. Plus, you will have the advantage of being able to link any subsequent entries to your personal page should you want to.
For example, you may submit an entry on a project you are working on, and then link to your personal page from within it, or include your name as an associated tag (or both).
Log in and start submitting!
Log into the admin area choose the ‘Write a post’ quicklink or select the ‘Write’ option from the main navigation menu and you’ll get a simple form to create your entry with. We just ask that you follow these guidelines to help keep LiveArchives a useful resource.
Naming conventions.
When creating a new post, please use descriptive full names or titles with the correct capitalisation. Abbreviations may be used if it is in common use, such as AHRC, but we ask that you include the full name in the main content of the post.
Please use standard capitalisation for names.
eg. Frank Zappa, not frank zappa.
Categories
Every post you submit must be associated with one or more of the existing categories. If your post does not fit in with any existing categories, please submit a request to create a new category with a reason supporting your request and set the category to ‘Uncategorized’.
You should select the most suitable category(s) for your post from the menu on the right hand side of the edit post page.
The Rich Text Editor
Please note, while the functionality of the Rich Text Editor (RTE) may still be available, it is not fully supported on Mac OS Xs bundled browser Safari. Therefore, we highly recommend that you use the latest version of Firefox on all platforms.
The RTE allows you to add basic formatting to your posts, embolden, italicise, create lists, add images, split posts (to display a shorter summary on pages that display multiple posts eg. a category page) and check spelling. Clicking on the help icon (blue circle with question mark) will bring up more detailed help on using the RTE.
The Code tab allows you to edit the HTML code of the post directly, should you wish to do so.
Tags
Tagging your entries is one of the most valuable facets of this archive. It functions in much the same way that sites such as Flickr and YouTube operate. You can store as many tags as you like to associate relevant words in your entry. This serves as a way to relate information (such as other posts) through their associated tags.
Just enter comma separated words or phrases directly into the Tags field just below the post eg. live, archive, live archive,
The Suggested Tags option offers up some of the more common or recently used tags which you can quickly add by clicking on the desired tag name.
Embedding Media
It is possible to embed external media into your posts.
We currently support the following file types:
- mid
- mp3
- mov
- mpeg
Audio
Embed audio files using [qt: link/to/file ] tag within your post.
For example, typing the following in your post…
[qt:http://site.com/path/to/sample.mid]
would produce…
Video
You can also use the [qt: link/to/file width height] tag to embed video in your post. You must also provide the width and height dimensions, don’t forget to add 16px to the height to allow for the control bar.
For example, typing the following in your post…
[qt:http://site.com/path/to/sample.mov 200 260]
would produce…
Further Reading
There are further more advanced applications of the the post editor which can be discovered at the WordPress site. We will continue to make additions to this section as the site develops.