This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Editor's note: It made us feel all awesome inside when we saw this article from Brian. That people dig Bitmob enough to even want to write all this is fantastic. Lots of good advice, but we had so much to say in response to the stuff below, we broke our normal "Editor's note" format to throw in a bunch of extra comments within the body text itself. Hope you didn't mind me writing all over your post, Brian!
You can find this article, as well as the previous "tips" piece that we wrote, in our Submission Guidelines section that we've linked to all the way down in the footer section of Bitmob. -Shoe
One of the things I like most about Bitmob, aside from the fact that it's not just another video game news site, is that anybody in the community who has something to say can sign up and say it. The content here is as (or more) varied as anywhere on the web, and I think we're all better for it.
There is, however, occasionally a problem where that great content can get obscured by technical issues. As any chef will tell you, presentation is half the battle: Even if a restaurant has the best burgers in the world, I doubt many people would go there if the chef looked like Barth from You Can't Do That On Television (RIP, Les Lye).
Would you eat a burger served by this man?
Since I earn my living as a computer engineer, I am pretty much an enormous dork. I built the computer I'm using to write this entry, I actually read the manuals for new electronics that I buy, and last week I wrote a quick program to investigate proper betting strategy going into Final Jeopardy! when you're in second place.
(If you're curious, assuming the leader is going to bet to beat double your score by $1 if they get it right, betting to beat their current score by $1 will win every time no matter what you do if they get it wrong, and the margin between you is less than a third of your score.)
So what's my point? If it has to do with computers, I'm pretty good at figuring stuff out — and I'm about to pass some of that knowledge on to the rest of the community with some basic tips about the nuts & bolts of Bitmob article writing.
Tip #0: Incorporate the jump.
Already wrote a whole article about this. Go check it out!
Editor's note: Can't argue with this…except that the jump isn't working properly for you guys in the Mobfeed anyways. That's something we're working on, but our dilemma: If we let readers define their jump on the Mobfeed, then some people may take advantage and put it at the bottom of the post to force their whole story on people in that feed. Or they may forget about it all together. So we're working on ways around this.
But Brian's point is still valid. Make sure you get to the point of your article fairly quickly at the start, because if we promote your story to the front page, we'll be putting in the jump for you. Don't make us cut out too much of your intro because it's too long, pre-jump!
Tip #1: Don't actually *write* your articles on Bitmob.
No offense meant to the editors, but the MyBlog application is a bit…quirky. It acts different in every browser (and it's frozen Firefox every time I've tried), it's not exactly easy to get it to do what you want it to do, and it sometimes does stuff that can be kind of unexpected.
So instead of struggling with MyBlog throughout the whole writing process, write your first draft in a word processor so that you can get the whole thing done before attemping to import it. I personally use Google Docs — that way I can start an article at home and work on it during my lunch hour at work or vice versa.
Editor's note: Yeah, we know our stuff's a bit…quirky. Unfortunately, we're spending our personal money here, so we have to look for cheap or free solutions. MyBlog is better now (it saves much faster than before), but it's not without its problems. We're working on them! Strangely enough, Firefox actually works the best for us…better than Chrome or Internet Explorer.
But yes on what Brian said. No matter what content editor you use, you should always be writing your stuff offline first anyways, just in case your browser crashes and you lose your work. Plus, it's nice to have MS Word spellchecking and helping you with grammar, punctuation, extra spaces, and all that (just remember it's not always right!). Google Docs isn't bad since it's constantly saving your work.
One very important note: If you copy-and-paste from MS Word, please use the "Paste from Word" button! It's supposed to help strip out weird Word formatting things that can sometimes screw up the HTML, even causing our site to break at times (IE users have been reporting problems lately with this).
Tip #2: Get to know what's under the hood.
If you look up at the top of the MyBlog window, you'll notice a couple of tabs that say "Plain Text" and "Rich Text." Rich Text is the default, which gives you the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface that we're all used to. But if you want some more control, click over to the Plain Text tab, and you'll be treated to your article in all its raw HTML glory.
If you know HTML, this gives you a chance to do some things that just aren't possible with the Rich Text interface — like adding the horizontal line above or making non-header text bigger.
There are plenty of HTML tutorials out there on the web, and even the basic stuff will help when you need to do some extra tweaking. Not to mention having the ability to go from rich to plain text with one click will help your learning, as you can see exactly what changes on one side mean on the other side.
Also, the MyBlog application seems to have some spacing issues when copying and pasting text from word processors — but after pasting, clicking from Rich Text to Plain Text and back makes those issues show up in WYSIWYG, so you can easily fix them by hitting enter a few times instead of typing a bazillion paragraph tags.
Editor's note: Please don't make your body text bigger! We want Bitmob to look professional, so we don't want users to go crazy with the HTML. Otherwise we'll start looking like MySpace or eBay. Yuck.
Tip #3: Format your images correctly.
Following a couple of basic rules for including images will make your articles look much better & more professional.
First and foremost, don't leech images. "Leeching" is when you include an image in one of your articles that is hosted on somebody else's site, meaning that every time somebody loads your article, you're using up the other site's bandwidth, costing them money, and making them mad at Bitmob.
Instead, upload the images you're using for an article to your account on an imagesharing site like Flickr or Photobucket, and link to those instead. (I've seen a mythical "upload folder" — which I'm assuming is a place to put images that will be hosted by Bitmob — mentioned elsewhere on the site, but have not yet managed to find it.)
Second, make sure you space your images correctly. If an image is all by itself like the shot of Barth above, make sure that it's centered and put any captions in italics directly beneath it (also centered).
If you're inserting a left- or right-justified text-wrapped image instead — which you do by selecting either left or right Alignment on the "Appearance" tab — make sure you give it some space so your text isn't bumping right up against the border. Do that by entering a number in both the "Vertical space" and "Horizontal space" fields — 10 seems to do the trick nicely.
Finally, image sizing is also important. From what I've been able to determine, the pixel width of published articles is 540, so make sure that your images aren't any wider than that.
You can check that by looking at the "Dimensions" field and making sure the first number listed isn't any bigger than 540. If you leave the "Constrain proportions" box checked, your image will automatically scale after you change the width. Also, make sure that any wrapped images are 320 pixels wide or smaller.
Oh, and I just remembered about embedding videos. I tried this last week and it seemed a little wonky — no matter what values I entered for the size, the width was constant for every video. A size of 500×500 seemed to work for the YouTube videos I embedded.
Editor's note: You can go up to 570 px wide if you want your picture to fill up the whole column. No more! At the moment, we don't think we can offer users our server space to host images — we can't afford it — so Brian's recommendations are the way to go.
Tip #4: Wall of Text = bad.
Have you ever heard the expression "nature abhors a vacuum?" Well, here's a corollary — "Bitmob editors abhor paragraphs that are more than two or three sentences long."
Not to toot my own horn here, but I've had a few articles featured on the front page and in Spotlights, which means that the editors have gone in and changed a few things — and the biggest difference I always noticed is that they'd gone crazy splitting my articles into numerous tiny paragraphs.
Well, there's a reason for that — long paragraphs, especially online, tend to blur together into the dreaded Wall of Text, which lend themselves to skimming instead of reading (there's a reason why "tl;dr" is a common response to lengthy online posts).
So I started writing my newer articles with that in mind, chopping them into the smallest chunks that I thought still made sense — and they *still* made more paragraphs! The moral of the story is there's no paragraph short enough for those guys.
Editor's note: tl;dr. Ah, just kidding. But 100% yes on everything Brian just said.
Tip #5: Grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling (really).
As the editors themselves say in their submission guidelines, "Spell check is your friend who really likes you, and we stop reading after the first 'teh' or 'lol' or lower-case letter used to start off a new sentence." Well, I'm going to take it one step further and say that I take articles I'm reading a little less seriously every time I see a misused homophone or an extraneous comma.
Double-check your homophones, folks. Don't write "there" when you meant "their" or "breaks" when you meant "brakes" (both of which I've recently seen in the Mobfeed). I know proofreading is tough, but you're putting this stuff out there under your real name, so put in the extra effort.
Editor's note: And please watch the "you're" vs. "your" or "its" vs. "it's"…very common issues with Internet writing, though we're pleased to see we have fewer of those problems from our community than we've seen anywhere!
Punctuation isn't as big a deal, but it bugs the hell out of me when people don't do it quite right. Here's a quick primer: A comma is for putting a momentary pause in a sentence, to break it up and keep it from being a run-on; an em dash (–) breaks up two separate but related ideas in the same sentence; ellipses (…) are used for dramatic pauses; a colon starts a list; and a semicolon can be used to start a new related sentence or to break up entries in a long list like this one (see how I did that?).
Editor's note: Awesome stuff. By the way, we use two hyphens with spaces to either side as our em dash, used to show a separate but related thought or clause that interrupts — like this. Here's another example — man, we're such punctuation nerds — of how to use em dashes.
An easy way to double-check your punctuation is to read your articles to yourself out loud before posting them. I'm willing to bet there would be far fewer "This game is called, Fallout 3"-type sentences if authors gave them a "sound check."
If you put parentheses in the middle of a sentence, put any punctuation marks that belong to the outer sentence outside them, and any marks that belong to the parenthetical phrase inside them. (Parenthetical sentences should contain all punctuation marks inside the parentheses.)
For quoted stuff, you usually put the final period (or comma) inside of the quotes. Question and exclamation marks go inside the quote only if they're a part of the quote, outside if they're part of the surrounding sentence
Editor's note: For example:
Who said, "Shoe is a punk"?
She asked, "Where is Shoe, that punk?"
Lastly, make sure that you write your headlines correctly — capitalize only the first letter of the first word, the first letter of the first word after a colon, and any proper nouns (which you should normally capitalize anyway).
That's it for this edition of the Bitmob Suggestion Box. I hope that the community finds these tips useful — happy writing!