How to Write Articles: Advanced Information
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This online community is designed to be a reflection of our Idaho Falls community. We host lots of discussion activity via the chatbox and comment responses to articles. This series will help more people make the transition from reacting to published stories to writing stories themselves (which then generate comment responses).
The more people who write about local topics, the more comments get generated in response, the more engaged our community is both online and in the physical city.
This how-to series consists of beginner information, intermediate information, and advanced information. Advanced information will explain the text editor viewing options, how to align your images to allow text flow, editing your article’s timestamp (to publish in the future), and answers to questions as they are asked.
These instructions require many screenshots, so we’ll add the ‘more’ tag here so the page doesn’t load slower for everyone. If you are interested in learning about these advanced writing tips, click
When you are logged in and on the ‘Write’ screen where you write your article, you’ll notice a series of blue bars or boxes on the right side. You should first notice each blue bar has a name (like Discussion or Categories), and a plus or minus sign (+ or -).
Clicking the plus or minus sign simply opens or closes the information box under that blue bar, just like expanding or collapsing folders.
Defaults are preset for some of the boxes so you don’t have to know them right away. In fact, do not concern yourself with the Discussion, Password-Protect Post, or Post Slug sections in the right column. Really, it’s so geeky mundane you would be disappointed to find out what they do.
Post Status:
Did you accidentally hit ‘Publish’ instead of ‘Save’? Did you publish and immediately see a glaring error that will take awhile to fix? You can change the post status from Published to Draft and it will be removed from the public realm.
Post Timestamp: 
You can publish in the future by editing your article’s timestamp.
Why would you want to change the time your article is published? Perhaps your topic would be more appropriate on a certain future date, or you write a few articles at once and don’t want to publish them all at once.
You can change the date to anything in the future. Setting to a past date just gives you an error; you can’t change the past, man.
The timer must be military/24-hour version were 6PM is actually 1800, etc. You must check the
Edit Timestamp
checkbox and hit ’save’ or ‘publish’ the article for the timestamp to take effect.
The text editor viewing options: 
Remember the text editor is where you actually type your post/article/message. You can view the text editor to look like common word processors, or to look at a simple code view. The common word processor look is called the “Rich Visual Editor” and is accurately described as “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get).
The Code View is similar to the Rich Visual Editor, except text is formatted with HTML. HTML is easy to learn and use (you can pick it up in a couple hours), but if you don’t know any HTML you are probably better off sticking to the Rich Visual Editor.
The best reason to try the Code View is to gain better control of your article. You can align images on the right, and correct line spacing issues.
You can change between the two text editor formats by clicking your Profile link in the top left area, scroll to the bottom of your profile, and toggle the checkbox of
Use the visual rich editor when writing.
This is the result of changing to Code View:
You can see it has similar controls, but the article body is composed of HTML formatting, especially code used to display the image.
How to align your images to allow text to flow around them:
This can only be done in the Code View. Find the img tag (stands for ‘image’), and add align="right" inside the brackets somewhere before the closing bracket of the img tag.
Any more questions? Please ask your publishing questions in response to this ‘how-to’ article, so future writers can refer here first to see what has already been asked.
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