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 weekly to quarterly. You may post more frequently, however, you should expect to use our automatic posting process that will require you to either provide your own HTML markup or edit your material during posting to satisfy the minimal requirements for automated posting (see below). All listed contributors should expect to use our automated process for posting their material. The big advantage of this automated process is that commentaries will be posted immediately upon the satisfactory submission of your material ... no intervention from anyone else will be required to complete the posting of your commentaries!

Listed contributors will have their own login id and password for posting their material online. Listed contributors will be listed alphabetically on our Commentary page and 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.

If you are a known 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 links to your previous works online, or the text of your work. Once your work has been reviewed for compliance with our standards for online publication, you will be notified whether you have been accepted or not. 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 (only for our use to communicate with you).  Author's phone number will not be published or given to others without prior permission.
• Author's preferred email address for reader feedback.
• Author's bio (brief, about 200 words - larger may not fit in database field).
• URL to author's own web site (optional, no more than 40 characters, omit "http://" if url too long)
• Name of author's own web site (optional unless URL is supplied)
• Author's title associated with own web site (optional), e.g., "Editor"
• Samples of your articles (URLs or text) ... optional, use the "Other Information" field on the application to list articles and links.

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

Article information required for automatic posting:

• Article date (this will be the date article is to be posted at WEBCommentary, default is current date).
• Article title
• Article subtitle (optional)
• Introductory paragraph for article (optional, but highly recommended)
• Article text (recommended article length:  less than 1000 words, very large articles should be serialized). Text is optional if article URL is provided, however, it is strongly recommended that listed contributors provide article text instead of a URL.
• Article footnotes (optional, use if needed).
• Article URL if published elsewhere (optional, you must omit this if article text is supplied as above)

Requirements for automatic posting of article text:

• A form is provided for posting new articles. Article text is posted in a "textarea" field allowing you to make any alterations as required. if you do not post any article text, you must include a URL to your article, however, linked articles are normally discouraged but can be used when warranted.
• There are two methods you can use to post article text. Use the approach that is best suited to your skills.
  1. Copy your article body text to your clipboard then paste it into the textarea field and manually add paragraph markup (<p>) between each paragraph (do not place at either the beginning or end of the article text). This is a fast method for those not skilled with the HTML language.
  2. Alternately, you may copy and paste HTML-encoded article test into the body text field. However, if there are any embedded links, they must be edited to include the target=new (or similar) tag so linked material opens in a new window. 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. Be sure to conform to following requirements.

• Remove ALL " marks (double quote marks) from html code in body and notes fields (see next bullet for example).

• Embedded links MUST include a target=new attribute:
  (example: <a target=new href=http://www.webcommentary.com/special.htm>).
• An image will only be included with text if it resides at another web site and the complete URL to the image is supplied.
  (example: <img src=http://www.yourdomain/yourimg.jpg height=120 width=180 align=right alt=text_associated_with_link>).

To apply for contributor status, please use the Contributor Application Form. After your submitted application is approved, you will receive a username and password combination as well as further instructions telling you how to post.

Please read about unsolicited material.

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