Anyone who has access to the Authors Forum (aka you) also has access to Author Admin. That means you can directly add blog posts to Skeptical Science. Basically, how this works is there are two types of authors: Pending Authors and Full Authors. A Pending Author can add a blog post but can't go live with it - you need to drop me an email and ask for me to publish the blog post.

• Pending Author: generally, when I first make someone an author, they get Pending Author status. This is for two reasons, just so you can get used to all the technical quirks of our WYSIWYG editor and well, just to confirm that your writing matches with the tone of Skeptical Science (eg - not political, not too personal, science based).
• Full Author: after a few posts, I usually upgrade your account to Full Author so you can add blog posts and go live with them immediately without having to wait for me to publish them. However, I am a forgetful and disorganised person so if you feel you've 'earned' Full Author status but I haven't got around to it, drop me an email reminder :-)

Tips on writing a blog post

• Decide on just one or two take-home points. You don't want to overload the read with too much or they'll come away with nothing. Give them a clear message.
• Keep the writing simple and easy-to-understand. Avoid acronyms and technical terms. General rule of thumb - imagine explaining it to a non-scientist friend. A conversational style is good for a blog post.
• Graphs and illustrations are good to break up the text. But make sure they increase understanding, not confusion. So avoid graphics that have too much information crammed into them - the simpler the better. Unlike graphs in peer-reviewed papers, a blog post graph is there to increase understanding, not to communicate as much information as possible.
• Focus on science, not ad hominem attacks or politics. Skeptical Science is about educating the public about science.

Technical tips

• It's always recommended you upload images to the Skeptical Science website rather than hotlink them from other websites where they can change or move. You can upload images by clicking the Upload Image link in the navigation links above.
• Make sure you resize your images down to no wider than 500 pixels before uploading. JPEG, GIF or PNG are the recommended file formats.
• Copying and pasting your text from Word can bring nasty HTML code into your blog post. It's better to write your article in a plain text file to avoid dodgy code issues.

- the Blog subfolder should show up on the bar on the left-hand side of each page.

- the status of the reader's viewership for the sub-folders on the Authors page should be indicated with the color-refresh feature: It should be possible for me to go to just the Authors page and see if there are any postings that I haven't already read, without having to open up to that sub-folder's list in full.

Hi Folks,

Neal was helping me with my blog a couple of days ago and what was seen as two side by side images on my computer was seen as two images, one on top of the other on his.

Today I worked on my blog at home and it appeared fine.  I came to work and things looked different on my computer at work.

Does anybody know what's going on?

Thanks,

Bob Guercio

Just came back home and my blog shows up slightly differently depending upon which browser I use.  Firefox or Microsoft?

Bob

Hi Bob,

hazarding a guess, I'd say that the resolution is different on your two computers, or you have the page-display set to different zoom-factors. The WYSIWYG-HTML-editor and the browsers take these (and most likely other settings!) into account and if the two pictures need more space than is available they will be displayed one on top of the other instead of next to each other.

What I do, if I want to ensure that two pictures always get displayed side-by-side, is that I create a combined picture - either with a dedicated software or with eg. MS-Powerpoint and a screen-capture program. That way, I can better "control" how the result looks like (regardless of eg. a user's setting).

Hope this helps!

Cheers
Baerbel

Update: Just saw your comment about the browsers - that's another possibility, as Firefox and IE (and Chrome and others) don't always interpret the HTML-formatting exactly the same way. This can affect things like font-size and font-colors to name just two.

Baerbel,

Thanks for the response.

I'll see how my blogs show up on John Cook's computer.  That's the one to worry about:):)

Bob

I'm still unclear how this works. 

I assumed before publishing, a blog would be reviewed for comment by others, is this what happens if you press 'save and continue editing'?

I may have published an article directly here, although hopefully it is OK.  

Sorry if I have jumped the gun here.

I found instructions for inserting a video here:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/thread.php?t=4321