tamingthemuse | A quick primer on how to post

Okay, so you want to post your story here, but you're having problems. This is a quick review on how to post stories, and it includes pictures, so DO NOT click if you don't want all the pictures clogging your bandwidth.

First, you need to get the story into the community. You have two options here depending on whether you want to use plain text mode or rich text mode. Let's start with plain test since *most* people go there when they hit "Update Journal." This is the updating screen that has no buttons at the top of the window where you type the words. Type an lj-cut between your header and your story like is shown below.

But maybe you want to make bold text and italics and do fancy stuff. Then you have to use rich text mode. You get to rich text mode by clicking the words at the bottom of the typing window... they're in blue. If you use rich text, you will have a different screen, and you will need to follow these directions....

So, now you have your story all ready to post, but if you're like me when I first joined a community, you don't know how to get the story TO the community (kisses to Darkhaven who got me sorted out over at Bloodclaim). You need to tell the journal where to post by looking for the "Post to" option near the bottom of the screen. As soon as you've joined at least one community, you have a little drop down box next to your LJ name. Click it and choose which community to post to. WARNING... if you post to the wrong place, you can't change that later. You'll have to delete the whole entry and start over.

Weeeeeeeeeee... you now posted to the community. But maybe you want your friends to see that you've put a story over there. Easy squeezy. First, you have to know the exact address of your story in the community. So, go to the community and click on your story. Once you see the address in the address line, highlight it and copy it.

Now you're ready to create a new journal entry where you tell your friends all about your new story. Go to "Update Journal" and go into rich text mode (it really is simplier).

Oh, and the order is type, highlight, click, and then paste the address you copied in the last step. Now you post this to your journal, and your friends can click straight to your story in the community.

I minimized the graphics as much as possible, so hopefully they don't look too bad, and hopefully this makes posting a bit easier.