webmasters

Extremely important:
PLEASE READ THIS PAGE BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ON THE WEBSITE (including desk editors).

This is so that we maintain a semblance of standards and unity at ridgeonline and so that nobody screws up the previous work before. Do not skim through, read it thoroughly. I will be maintaining this part so that anybody who signs on to the Ridge Online for several reasons:

  1. New Webmasters know what they’re doing.
  2. Old Webmasters keep in touch with the latest developments.
  3. Editors who want to personally make edits don’t create more work for webmasters.
  4. Editors know what the webmasters need and will do for posting online articles.

Last updated: 25 April 2008
sections: Visual editor, Types of articles

Visual editor – turn it off

This is the most important thing for all collaborators at RidgeOnline. The visual editor is very annoying. It really messes things up and produces horrible messy code AND will revise the coding of previous articles, screwing things up for webmasters to clean up. You must turn it off.

To turn Visual Editor off:

Go to your dashboard.
On the grey bar above all the buttons and links, on the right it says “Howdy, [username]!”
Click on your username.
Scroll down until you see the option “visual editor”.
Uncheck the box.
Scroll all the way down, and click on “Update settings”.

You may now edit articles on Ridgeonline. If you really like using the visual editor, you may turn it on again for your other blogs but remember to turn it off whenever you want to edit articles on Ridgeonline.

Types of Articles/Posting, and What You Should Do With Them

As far as my experience shows, there are several kinds of things that need posting. I will address them here on what needs to be done with them in some detail.

Regular post, normal priority

Regular posts are just normal articles. Please refer to the following section, “Checklist for posting” on what to do with regular posts. The Chief Webmaster does not need to be SMSed about these postings. Webmasters will be notified by SMS on the same day unless the article was sent after 12.30am. (I don’t want to sent out late-night SMS, they’re irritating to people.) Otherwise, they will be notified in the morning. The assignment email will be sent out ASAP nonetheless.

If the chief webmaster forgets to send the necessary files, please SMS/IM him instead for immediate action.

Regular post, high priority

Regular posts with high priority are rush jobs trying to meet a symbolic or timeliness deadline. Editors should SMS the chief webmaster about the high priority job, preferably giving advanced notice so that a webmaster can be sought and the files sent directly to him/her for posting. I don’t mind late-night SMSes — If anything, Yi Jian is a heavy sleeper. If there is no advance notice given, the chief webmaster will attempt to find a webmaster or post it himself if the assignment is past 12.30am. Please try to avoid this because it takes a toll on the chief webmaster. Otherwise, the rest follows regular posting procedure.

Print issue announcement

Print issue announcements are posts which announce the availability of the print issue. Webmasters will be sent a PDF file of the current Ridge print issue. They will need to extract the cover page and save it as a 400px wide image named like “apr08-cover-euphoria.jpg”. A post needs to be created, with the cover page image and a link to download the PDF file. Similarly, a highlights post and an entry in “Breaking News” needs to be placed.

All Print Issue Announcemnts must be categorised under “Print” and “Released”. There needs to be a corresponding sidebar banner 202 pixels wide announcing the print issue. If you cannot access the “design” section on the sidebar, the chief webmaster will do the rest as soon as you inform him/her.

Editors, the print issue announcement is preferably announced (with all files sent) to the webteam PRIOR to the release of the print issue for timeliness.

For examples of such posts, please refer to category:print

Advertisements

Self-explanatory. They function as regular posts at normal priority, but they are NOT listed in the archival pages such as breaking news, transmedia, etc. They may be listed in the highlights post, depending on the editor. They are categorised under “ad”, not “advertisements”.

For examples of advertisements, please refer to category:ad

Monthly Highlights

The Monthly highlights is a post containing blurbs of the online posts made that month, as well as section on “Regular Reads”, links to pertinent blog posts and online resources. The most current highlights post is always “sticky”, i.e. the timestamp is always modified to be the latest article so that it appears as the fist article on the front page. The Monthly Highlights is always titled “Highlights of [month]“, and must be categorised under “Highlights”. Note that wordpress does not display any articles dated in the future.

The blurbs are actually just rows on a table. Scroll down further to find the standard code for the row. There are two columns in the table. The left column contains an image 128 pixels wide. The right column contains a link to the corresponding article and the summary of the article. The row can be directly copied to the tables in the Archival pages.

Others:
As a webmaster, if you encouter a posting that you do not know what to do about, it should be expected that you do the following:

  • Search for other similar articles for formatting precedence, and mimic as much as possible. Always always do this when you don’t know what to do.
  • Do whatever that you possibly can with the greatest amount of intelligence as you can afford.
  • Send an email detailing what you have done as much as possible and explaning your uncertainty. It reflects badly to simply say “I don’t know what to do”. It’s better to say, “I’m not sure what to do, but I’ve tried looking at xyz, and thus I’ve done abc, and def needs to be fixed, but what do you think about it? You weren’t clear about this, so I did this instead.”
Checklist for posting

For any regular posts, you may use the following checklist to ensure that you have done what’s necessary for a good posting.

<

  1. Download the Item in Word format
  2. Extract the Images from the word file
    • In articles, resize to 300-440 pixels width
    • Thumbnails, resize to 128 pixels width
  3. Create a new post
    • Copy headline, check categories, copy tags
    • Insert credits without formatting, Name [space] | [space] Email 
    • Desk is formatted to <span style=”font-family:Lucida Sans, sans-serif;font-weight:bold;font-style:italic;”>
    • Insert text
    • Upload pictures, paste in text
    • Format text
    • Double check formatting
    • Post up
  4. Edit the Highlights post
    • Create a <tr> at the top of the current list
    • Insert thumbnail in table
    • Link thumbnail to article
    • Edit the headline
    • Link headline to article
    • Copy summary from email assignment
    • Ctrl+C entire <tr> section
  5. Edit the Page
    • Paste the <tr> from highlights post
    • Email back
Quick reference for highlights table row
Use the following code when creating a blurb in the highlights post.

<span style=”margin-left: 2px”

<tr>
<td align=”center” width=”40%”><a href=”URL OF PAGE“> <img src=”IMAGE URL“
/></a></td>
<td style=”text-align: justify”
align=”left”><big><b><a
href=”URL OF PAGE“>TITLE</a></b></big>


<span>
DESCRIPTION
</span>
 
</td>
</tr>
<tr>

Ads

Usually they will have an image posted before the text, centralised. And they will have a banner put on the right side bar that links to the advert post. Except for the ridge’s own banners which will always be on the top, new banners will be put last, ie above the search box.

Next make sure that the Highlights post is sticky.

Banners will be taken down around max of 1 week after the event. We’ll juz leave the banner around a few days after the event.

The order of the ads on the right side bar will be as follows:

-RIDGE ADS
-High priority ADS(FIRST ONE FIRST)
-Low priority STUDENT ADS
-ILOVESG (permanent bottom sticky)

Article Formatting

There are currently 2 types of articles, transmedia and news. Articles posted will come in Microsoft doc files, presented in a WYSIWYG manner, with information on tags and categories, headline and summary.

First line is the title or headline. This will not appear in the body of the post.

The by-line of the article usually an email address. Let’s standardise once and for all that the hyperlink to that email does not need to be active i.e. the email should not be hyperlinked. Don’t need to be blue too. There should be space between the name and the | and the email.

The by-line will also contain a desk name. eg. the ridge transmedia. Please take note of the formatting.

Where text of posts contains “the ridge (or the respective desks)”, the text should be formatted as follows:

the ridge transmedia

This produces the ridge transmedia

Therefore, the by-line should look like this:

Hannah Yan | h_y@nus.edu.sg
the ridge news
A NUSSU Publication

April 4, 2008

There should be a paragraph break between the date and “A NUSSU Publication”. This gives some emphasis on the date of the article being written, and preserves the nice three-line format of the byline. Only Jan, Feb, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov & Dec needs to be in short form. Once shortened, there is a full stop denoting the truncation. Dates are not 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. They are 1, 2 and 3.

Note also that for news articles, there is a small summary at the top after the date. Please format it this way:

Story Highlights:

  • Communications and New Media classes conducted online for a week
  • Exercise to test readiness of faculty staff to face emergency situations
  • Lectures to be podcasted, some tutorials on virtual classroom program – Centra
  • Teaching staff receptive to exercise, reserved about long-term possibilities
  • Students looking forward to flexible schedule

The formatting applied should look like this:

Story Highlights:

  • Communications and New Media classes conducted online for a week
  • Exercise to test readiness of faculty staff to face emergency situations
  • Lectures to be podcasted, some tutorials on virtual classroom program – Centra
  • Teaching staff receptive to exercise, reserved about long-term possibilities
  • Students looking forward to flexible schedule

A good article to refer to when looking at both the By-line and Story Highlights is this one.

Sometimes the articles may contain formatting like italics and bold. These can be quite hard to spot at times… especially since we are using the non visual editor. So I have asked the editors to highlight the formatted text in yellow to make these easier to spot. Sometimes, they miss that out. So it pays to be sharp to minimise the turnaround time for the article.

For images in the text, you may extract them using the tips provided at http://www.gmayor.com/extract_images_from_word.htm. Make sure that they meet the criteria.

Some guidelines on Images

Pictures/Images (webmasters): Save as JPG, especially photographs. Line graphics can be saved as PNG – stop using GIFs because they’re outdated.

Landscape photos should be resized to at least 400pixels wide, maximum 445 pixels because that’s the fixed width of the wordpress column. Portrait photos are clumsy because if they’re 400 pixels wide they will take up a lot of horizontal space — or otherwise leave a lot of white space. For example, the Natasha Monks interview pictures could somehow look better. We haven’t got a policy of text wrapping yet for photos so if someone would bother to experiment, we’ll work something out. But we have to decide whether we want all left-aligned, all right-aligned or alternating and the ideal size for such pictures (150×225?). Anyway, a good alternative is to put two portrait-sized pictures side-by-side, something like in the Many Undergraduates Not Aware of Earth Hour article.

Needless to say, wide pictures should be centered, the caption underneath it should be italicised and centered too. There should be a paragraph break between the caption and the photo credit. The photo credit should also be centered and italicised. If pictures are side-by-side, then the captions have to be split and centered respectively (not left-aligned in a table).

Pictures/Images (Editors): Ideally, desk editors and authors should have the first picture as high as possible because that way it grabs attention. Also, ideally there should not be a wall of text i.e. a screen of text without any pictures. Thus, we should have a photo break for every 300-350 words of the article. Generally, we should put up more photos! We are underutilizing the power of the internet if there are less photos. Remind the writers to aim to get 3-4 publishable photos, and insert more pictures into the article. Best if we can put up one really striking and huge image at the top (instead of doubling up for the first photo).

At all times, resize the images to an appropriate size, and try to keep it within 40kb. This applies to banners as well. And please rename the images to a meaningful name for easier maintainence.

Posting the Highlights Blurb
After posting, the highlights post needs to be updated. Pls refer to this example.

Just edit the table to create a new row ON TOP to contain a thumbnail, title, and summary. Then, link the headline and thumbnail to the post. Instead of creating a thumbnail yourself, you can use the thumbnail that is created by wordpress when you upload the image in the dashboard.

A tip about using the thumbnail, have the post in editing mode, then upload the image if u haven’t, or if u have, then go to the image and click on it. Make sure thumbnail is selected. Juz click send to send the code to the screenshot when thumbnail is selected. You will need to edit the code to make the thumbnail link to the post.

For articles without images, there will be a default thumbnail for use…

  • For the ridge news, please use the image here (ie ur img src equals blah blah blah).
  • For Your shout! it is here.
  • For the ridge transmedia, please use the image here
  • Links to the other thumbnails will be provided soon.

Next make sure that the Highlights post is sticky.

After updating the Highlights post, you need to update the desk page, eg. news, transmedia. Reuse code from the highlights page. Please remember to backup (next para).

Backup

If you are editing any of the pages (not posts) or the advert space, please backup the original code on ur pc or before proceeding. There have been cases whereby the code has been erased.. ( i suspect due to some of our desk editors using visual editor) So pls do have a backup of your own… For me I do occasional backups as a draft page under the parent page with the date. eg. backup news 07/11/07.

Will come in handy if I need to ask anyone to redo stuff.

Banners

All banners as far as possible needs to be the standard size of 202 x 85 pixels, centralised, at the right side bar. And will link back to the advert post.

Try to achieve the size using cropping. If not minute differences in size can be tolerated as long as the banner looks fine on the site.

<p> tags

Not necessary to put.. just enter will do.

For example, in the following code, removing the

tags will have no effect for the current theme.. ie the formatting will be the same.

the ridge brings you into the exciting world of Monochrome this November.

Join in our colour-blind writers together with The Dotted Line Shop, classic films and minority issues, and spot a familiar face in our special CANVAS feature. Could it be you?

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Added on 28 Feb 2008

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