All ICBL campaigners can post their news to the ICBL website at www.icbl.org/news. This ensures that the wider public and the campaign will know what your country campaign is up to and also forms part of the ICBLs Landmine Update.
Before you start on this you need to
- Have an account on the website.
If you don't have one click "Sign In" (top left) then "Sign Up" to create one.
The User Information Page - found by clicking on your name in the menu - with the group membership information. Most users will be members only of the ICBL Campaign group, if you are only member of the Guest group you will not be able to post news articles.
- Make sure your account is a member of the ICBL campaign group.
To check go to your user information page (click on [yourname]'s menu) and see the group memberships.
If you are not then write to webmasterSPAMFLTER@SPATMFLTERicbl.org , telling your username and explain who you are. This will then be handled by the ICBL staff and your account added if appropriate.
To post your news article you do the following:
NB! Do not click "Send for publishing" until you are fully satisfied with your article. Once you have clicked this button the article is sent to ICBL staff for approval and is not available for you to edit until it has been approved.
To store your article before you have finished use "Store draft".
- Go to www.icbl.org/news and click the "New News Article" button.
- Fill in the fields of the form as carefully as possible.
We'll here highlight the most important ones and what must be filled in in order to publish.
(For a full explanation of all the fields see our longer news article fields explained FAQ.)
- Short name
This becomes the URL/address of the page, please do write with proper casing. Eg do not write "landmine monitor rpt launch" but rather "Landmine Monitor Report Launch" which would as URL automatically become www.icbl.org/news/landmine_monitor_report_launch.
Showing a news article with the different fields with their fieldnames as the content.
- Title
The title of the news article which will show on top of the page.
- Title for front
Can be the same as the title, but this will show when the article is listed on the ICBL front and in the News section (www.icbl.org/news)
- Blurb
Optional but good to have two to three lines of text to show with the "Title for front" on front and in the News section. That gives a brief introduction to the main content of your article.
NB! This text will not show in the article itself but can be repeated in the intro if you wish.
- Body
The actual content of your news article. You can paste text from MS Word or any other program. Note that the formatting is quite limited and you are not allowed to eg. change the font or the font size. Use the headings to emphasize titles within the document.
- Keywords
As a minimum enter the country the news article relates to as a keyword. If it is relevant also enter keywords such as demining, victim assistance, mre etc. Note that landmine is not an important keyword since everything on our site relates to landmines.
- The remaining fields are optional or have a default value which is usually ok.
- Once you have filled in all you can click "Preview" (in the top right corner) to get an idea of how your news article will look on the web (with standard formatting etc).
NB! If you had skipped obligatory fields or entered incorrect values in any of the fields you will get a message that "input did not validate". Please review these fields and try again.
This might also happen if you copied text from for example MS Word and the system corrects formatting which is not allowed. You will then get the message that "Input was partially stored" and the text will then be automatically corrected and clicking Preview again should work.
- If you are happy with what you see in the preview you can click Publish at the bottom of the preview. If you wish to continue editing click Edit and then click preview again once you have entered your new changes.
- Once you have clicked Publish the article will be sent to ICBL staff for approval and they will make visible to the public or make changes as neccessary and inform you when it is ready.
Further pages to read to make a newsarticle others will want to read: