Update: As of February 2012 this page is to be considered out of date. Click here for the Posting Guide 3.0.

There are a few nuances with getting your articles looking good on Negative Gamer. Whilst the site does update frequently, this page is a good place to start if you’re stuck.

Refreshing a page

When editing a live article or page, the server will save a copy of the page and, if it doesn’t think anything has changed, show you the saved copy when you reload the page. To get around this simply add a question mark and a number to the end of the URL. If you use a number not used in the past 30 mins, the server thinks you’re loading a new page and so will not load the saved file for you.

Alternate front page image (or if there is no image in the post)

Often times you will want the front page image for a post to be different to the first image in the post. If the first image has text on you don’t want on the front page, for formatting reasons; if the first image is not the right size, not 500x300px; or maybe if there simply isn’t an image.

To use a different image on the front page upload the alt image to the server (as you would a normal image) then get its URL (I insert the image, copy the URL, then remove the image from the post). On the Edit Page find the “Custom Fields” box. Paste the URL of the image into the Value box, and select “articleimg” as the name of the field. Click “Add Custom Field” to save this.

The Exerpt

When an article is “featured” on the home page it has a small text blurb underneath the main image. If you don’t define the text it simply takes the first 50 words from the article. To set the text yourself, on the Edit Page, find the “Exerpt” box. This text box contains the text that’s going to be displayed.

There is a fixed amount of space on the front page below the image, so if you have a short title, write a longer expert and if you have a long title either use a front page alternative title (see the segment below), or write a smaller exerpt. Be sure to check when the post is published that everything fits.

Alternate front page title

This alternate title is only used on the front page when the article is the “featured” one. Use this option if your title is very long, and there’s no easy way to shorten it. As with the alternate image, use the Custom Fields box. In the “Value” enter the new title and set the Name of the field to “articletitle”. Be sure to click Add Custom Field and the alternate title will be saved when the post is saved.

Special Quotes

To do special quote, like the one on the left you need to go into HTML View and add the following code; <div class=”alignleft specialquote”> Sample text is here </div>. (If you copy the code from here, be sure to to change the speech marks to the standard ones in the HTML view.) The alignleft can be replaced with alignright, depending on which side you want the quote to be on, and the specialquote makes sure it’s formatted correctly.