Listed Contributor Guide

If you would like to become a listed contributor to WEBCommentary, you should expect to post commentaries with a frequency ranging from daily to quarterly. All listed contributors should expect to use our login process to post their material. The big advantage of this process is that commentaries will be posted immediately upon submission ... no intervention from anyone else is required to post your commentaries!

Listed contributors will have their own login id and password for posting their material online. Contributors will be listed alphabetically in the dark red left margin of our Cover (home) page. At the bottom of the dark left margin is a convenient link to the "Contributor Login" page to allow you to post your commentary (or a link to it if it already is posted on another site).

If you are a recognized author of online commentary, chances are good that you will be accepted as a listed contributor to WEBCommentary provided all other requirements are satisfied. If you are not well known online, you will need to provide either URLs to your previous works online, or text of typical commentary. Once your work has been reviewed for compliance with our standards for online publication, you will be notified if you have been accepted. No contributor will be accepted unless all required information is supplied (see below).

Author information required to become a listed contributor:

• Author's full name as it should appear online.
• Author's phone number (in the unlikely event we need to contact you by phone).  Author's phone number will not be published or given to others.
• Author's preferred email address for reader feedback and so you can be contacted by WEBCommentary.
• Author's bio (try to be brief, about 200 words).
• URL to author's web site (optional)
• Name of author's web site (optional, omit unless URL is supplied)
• Author's title associated with web site (optional, omit unless URL is supplied), e.g., "Editor"
• Samples of your articles (URLs or text) ... optional, use the "Other Information" field on the application to list articles and links.
• A brief description of the type of commentary you write (e.g., environmental, political, cultural, etc.).

Once your application has been reviewed and approved, your assigned login id and password will be emailed to you at the address you supply. You may then begin to post your commentary online using our contributor posting process (see guide below for posting commentary). A convenient link to the "Contributor Login" page can be found at the bottom of the dark red left margin of WEBCommentary's home page.

Commentary information required when using the contributor posting process (all information is required unless optional is indicated:

• Commentary date (unique, this will be the date article will first appear at WEBCommentary, default is current date).
• Commentary title.
• Commentary subtitle (optional).
• Introductory paragraph for commentary (optional), but recommended - an inticement for readers to read more, only ONE paragraph (no formatting required) is allowed.
• Commentary text - try to be as brief as possible, but commentary can be any length. For benefit of readers, consider serializing very large commentary. If your commentary is published elsewhere online, you may omit the text and footnote fields and provide a URL to your commentary (see below).
• Commentary notes (optional, use if needed for supporting documentation or additional information, not applicable if URL to commentary is supplied).
• Commentary URL (optional), if published elsewhere online (you must omit this if commentary text is supplied above).

Guide for posting commentary:

• If you successfully login, there are options to post new commentary, and edit or delete an existing commentary. As an alternative to posting article text, you may specify a URL (e.g., http://www.mysite.myarticle.html) to your commentary posted at another site.
• The quickest method to post commentary text is to simply copy your commentary body text to your clipboard then paste it into the body textarea field. Other fields, such as the optional introductory paragraph and optional notes, can also be quickly pasted into their appropriate fields.
• Paragraph separation will be created for you provided you allow a blank line between paragraphs. Important Note: If you fail to separate paragraphs with a blank line and do not provide your own HTML paragraph separators, your commentary will appear as one large paragraph!
• If URL(s) (e.g., "http://www.referencedsite.com/somepage.html") are found within the text of your commentary, they will automatically be formatted into links with a target window tag. URLs may be enclosed within parentheses, e.g., (http://www.blahblah.org) or followed by a comma (and space), e.g., http://www.anothersite.com, or found at the end of a sentence, e.g., http://www.ashere.com. You may provide HTML coded links if you want to show linked text different from the URL (when links are automatically created from a URL, the URL is used as the linked text. Automatic conversion of links is performed only in body and notes fields.
• If you are experienced with HTML coding, you may copy and paste HTML-encoded commentary text into commentary fields, however, do not use CSS formatting that is not defined within the HTML code you provide. When HTML-encoded material includes embedded links, unless links already are coded with a target tag, they must be edited to include the target="anything" (or whatever you want to label the target window) tag so linked material opens in a new window. Please remove any leading or trailing paragraph markups to any field in which you post material. When using this alternate method, avoid altering font face or size and do not include image links unless they are linked to a complete URL. When supplying your own HTML-encoded material, be sure to conform to the following requirements.

  1. Embedded links MUST include a target="anything" attribute:
     (example: <a target="xyz" href="http://www.webcommentary.com/example.php">linked text</a>). This is to your advantage as it allows links from your commentary to be viewed while your commentary remains in a separate window.
  2. To include an image, you MUST use the complete URL to the image located at another web site.
     (example: <img src="http://www.yourdomain/yourimg.jpg" height="120" width="180" align="right" alt="text describing image">).

If you are not a regular contributor to WEBCommentary and you'd like to be one, please apply using the Contributor Application Page. If your application is approved, you will receive a username and password combination to access posting pages as well as further instructions telling you how to post.

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