This page gives some guidance on how to use the OneClimate screen that you use to write a post - a "post" is a story, experience, question, solution that you have contributed.
When writing or editing a post OneClimate asks you to enter the following information:
Title - You have to give your post a title. Not much need to explain what this is for we hope, except to say that OneClimate is a bit mean and limits the title to 50 characters ... that's so we can squeeze it onto the front page.
Excerpt - This should be a short summary - ideally no more than 10 to 15 words - which describes what the post is about. You needn't specify an excerpt - but if you do, it will be used on the front page to describe the post. If you don't feel inspired enough to provide an excerpt, then OneClimate will just use the first few words of the main body as a feeble description of your masterpiece.
Main Body - This is where the real action is ... where you type in your experience, question, solution or whatever about climate change into a text box. There are some buttons at the top of the box which allow you to format the text - for example, make the text bold, italic, left or right justified and so on. The general approach is that you select the text you wish to format by dragging the cursor across it and then press the appropriate button.
As if that isn't exciting enough, OneClimate lets you put some more adventurous things in your post - click on the list below to find out more:
- Including Images in your Posts
- Links to other web pages
- Including Interactive Maps in your Posts
- Inserting Videos in a Post
- Audio
Permissions - this determines who will be allowed to change this post. You can choose from: Only me which means only you, the author, will be allowed to edit it; Anyone in my group which means anyone who is a member of the groups you belong to can edit it; All which means that anyone will be wllowed to edit it.
A tag is usually one or perhaps two words - you seperate each tag with commas. So, for example, if you entered "tony blair, kyoto, global warming" in the tags field, this would mean that the post had three tags: "tony-blair", "kyoto" and "global-warming" (tags are not case-sensitive, and the system changes spaces into dashes for tags with more than one word).
If you can, try and choose a tag that is already being used on OneClimate - a list of all the current tags is provided, and you can click on any one of them in that list and it will be automatically placed in the Tags field. But if you want a new tag, then just type it directly into the Tags field.
Location - this is an optional piece of information that we'd like if the post is about a specific place. For example, it might be a post about climate change in the Sahel, an international conference in Bejing, or your local re-cycling centre.
In this kind of case, we'd like you to provide the latitude and longtitude of the place that the post is about. Chances are that you won't know the latitude and location, so you can use the interactive map to find out the places latitude and longtitude - see Guide to Using Interactive Maps for more details.
After specifying these fields you may Publish your post. The post will then appear as the most recent post on your personal profile, and on the "Latest" section of the front page.
We want to make it as easy as possible to write and publish your posts, so we don't have any way of keeping posts in "draft" format ... as soon as you publish them they are publicly available. However you can then edit them if you wish to refine them. If you are writing a long post we recommend that you publish it frequently to avoid losing any of your valuable effort.