Please note: If you are not already approved to submit content, you will have to first set up a user account. Once you have set up a user account, let us know that you would like to submit a story or other content by emailing us. If the content is appropriate to the site, we will get you set up. If you have any questions, contact us here.

User Accounts

To register for a user account, go here.

A user account is not required to read stories or post comments, but it does give you the following:

• Ability to post forum topics, calendar events, and stories (the latter subject to editor approval)
• Automated email notification of updated content, responses to your stories, etc
• Confirmed authorship on all content you submit
• Ability to attach images or files to your submissions
• Personalized contact form

Create Content

To create content, click either "Publish" or "Create content" in the left-hand column. Then choose the content type you wish to create (Story, Event, or Forum Topic). Creating each type of content is fairly similar.

First, give your post a title. Then choose one or more tags to label your submission to aid in future searches. To choose multiple tags, hold down the "ctrl" key (on a PC) or the "Command" key (on a Mac). You may create your own labels by using the "free tag" field.

For putting content into the body you have two options:

1) For a text only post, just write want you want or paste text into the body field. It's really easy.

2) If you're interested something fancier, or want images included in the body of your post, click "enable rich text" just below the body field. This will bring up a toolbar with icons you are probably familiar with. To add pictures you have two options. The easiest is to click the image icon (it has a picture of a green tree in it) in the text editor toolbar. You will then get a box into which you can put the URL of the picture from the web you would like (to get the URL of an online image, "right click" with your mouse on the image, select "view image," and copy the URL).

To add pictures from your computer, or attach other files, click "file attachments" below, and upload the file(s) you would like. If you upload images, you can get the image into the body by dragging the uploaded image (the thumbnail in the upload file box) into the body of the text. Another way you can do this is to click the picture icon in the toolbar of the text editor (see above). The picture you've uploaded will have a URL associated with it. Put that URL for the picture you want into the box as you would with a web-based image, and then play with the formatting options as you choose.

When you are finished, you can either preview your submission, or just send it in by clicking "submit."

Selecting Multiple Items in Web-forms

When submitting content to this site, you will usually have the option of selecting from a list of available topics. Under Windows and Linux, can select multiple items in such lists by holding down the "Shift" or "Control" keys to select multiple items.

Under Mac OS X, use the Command key instead of Control to select items that aren't next to each other. Holding Shift allows you to select a number of items that are all together. The Control key is normally used to display a contextual menu when using a single-button mouse. If you have a two button mouse, you can right-click to achieve the same thing.

Tags

Tags (Subject Tags and Free Tagging in this site) are a way of labeling content by one or more topics to aid in searches and finding related content. For example, a story on prescribed fire in the Ozark National Forests may have tags for "Arkansas," "fire," and "public land." If a user were interested in stories about fire, they could click on "fire" under Subject Tags and all content with the "fire" tag would show up to look at. Similarly, if a reader were reading that above story about prescribed fire in Arkansas and wanted to find related information, they could click on any of the tags associated with the story itself (i.e. "fire") and find all other content with that tag.

Free Tagging is a way for users to generate their own tags outside of the main "Subject Tags." This may be useful for issues that are more specific, temporary, or other "niche" topics. Examples of Free Tags might be things like "Taum Sauk reservoir," "modnr," or "pesticides."

Also please be aware that this system is not perfect, and that we are doing our best to make it functional and user friendly. If you are well-versed in using Drupal and would like to help out, please let us know.