How to do stuff on Political Suicide

Thanks for registering with Political Suicide! I hope you enjoy using the site and hopefully adding content to it. There are a few things you can do here at Poli-Sui and everything happens in your personal folder. You can create your own heirarchy of folders to house your posts (say, one folder for Events; another for News Items; still another for Chat rooms or Photos), so feel free to go wild there. What matters most is when you are ready to "post" your content. When your post (or whatever) is ready to be seen, make sure you go to the "State:" button at the top of the page and select "Publish" or "Make Visible." Once you do that, your content will appear in all the right areas on the site. If you want to pull something back, select "Retract" from the "State" drop down and the content will no longer be visible in most areas (depending on the content, it may go back to "Public Draft" or "Private." The difference between "Public Draft" is where other members can see your content only in your home directory but it is not put in the full system and "Private" which is seen only by you.) Anyway, here are some things you can do here:

• To add a blog - From your folder, on the bar under the main buttons, find "add item" and select "coreblog2." Follow the questions and you'll be up in no time posting your blog. To post later entries, go back to that same blog (it's actually a folder) and select "Create New Entry" from the left-side menu. At least one Category is needed for each entry. Use tags that are descriptive of your content so it will be easily indexed (some suggestions are National, Local, Austin, Livability, etc). These tags are also indexed by Technorati as well so there are no extra things you need to do for them. Also, once you are finished writing up your entry, make sure to change the state to "make visible" which will publish your entry. If you publish something and then later, want to remove it (and this goes for most things on the site), you will need to "retract" it using the state drop-down. Otherwise, the editing options won't appear until it's been retracted. Your blog will automatically show up under the main site link "Blogs" but your entries, once published, will get posted on the home page. Also, a quick note on the "Digg" submission: if you add a subtitle to your blog entry, that will be submitted to Digg as the bodytext property. Otherwise, the submitter will have to fill that field out. If that makes no sense to you, don't worry about it... :-)
• To submit news items - Go to the "add item" button and select "news item."  They will appear under the "Interesting Stuff" link on top of the page.
• To create a chat room - Go to "add item" and select "chat." Follow the questions and it will setup the chat room. Your room will appear in the chat room listing on the home page of Poli-Sui. Once published, it will show up in the Chats main site link.
• Add an event - If you want to put on the calendar any event (you're sponsoring a group meeting, you'll be online to discuss your latest blog post, etc), select "add item" and "event." Fill out the form and your event will appear on the calendar and in the "Events" portlet on the home page.
• Add a poll - If you want to run a poll, just select "poll" from the "add item" menu. Once you publish it, it will show up under the Poll main site link.

The other options under "add item" (file, folder, image, link, page) are for adding content to your folder. Feel free to add what you like to your folder (although there is a total file limit size of 25MB).

One last thing, when you add content, make sure that you change the "state" of your content to "make visible." That's how I gather and organize all of the content on the site. If it's not published, you might still be able to see it but it won't get indexed. And if it doesn't get indexed it won't make it to its final destination.

I'll be adding new features when I can so if there's anything you'd like to see, please let me know at paleo@politicalsuicide.org.

Good night and good luck!

Scott Brown
Chief Political Junky
PoliticalSuicide.org