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We recently rebuilt Bitmob from the ground up...mainly to make it easier for you guys to post stories on Bitmob but also to help us prepare better for future development.
Since community member Tom Heistuman mentioned it in our Welcome to Bitmob 1.1 post, here is a quick tour of the new article editor for those of you who like writing here on Bitmob. If you're only here to read about games, don't worry -- this stuff's not for you.
First, you have to make sure you're registered or signed-in to Bitmob.com (real names only, please!). Once you are, check your Profile tab at the top. That's where you can create a new story or see the ones you've made already. From here, click "New Post." This is what you should see:
Let's look at this window piece by piece.
Title is where you enter the headline of your article. Keep it short and sweet, yet descriptive enough to entice people to click on it.
Click all platforms your story applies to. This way, your story will appear under the right filters in the navigation options at the top of Bitmob. (Note: The Retro tab is coming!)
If your article's getting too long, try adding pages to help break it up, so your readers aren't staring at a huge mass of text. Don't abuse this, however -- people don't like having to click to continue reading if they can help it.
Fairly obvious (we think): Close will close this window without saving (other than what the autosave picks up), Save Draft will let you save your progress without publishing the story yet, and Save and Post will make your story live in the Mobfeed for everyone to see.
Select what type of article you're creating: feature/miscellaneous (default), review, preview, news, interview, or video. In a near-future iteration of Bitmob, we'll let users sort by these categories as well, so identify your posts now to help people find them later.
If someone clicks on the "Halo" tag, it will pull up a list of every story tagged with "Halo." So make sure you enter relevant tags here, if you want your post to show up in the appropriate lists. This is mainly for game titles and doesn't work well with vague concepts (ex: "old games" or "games as art") because they're only useful if other people are using the same exact tags and wording.
This window has an auto-suggest function -- use those when you can, so you're not creating new tags that no one is using.
Metadata keywords are similar to tags, only they're for search engines. Enter in any words or phrases (no commas) that you think someone might use in Google to help find your article.
Give a quick summary of your story here, so when people are looking through the Mobfeed, they will know why they need to read your particular article.
After you add a few images to your post, hit "refresh thumbnails" -- pick one to be a tiny visual representation of your story in the Mobfeed. You can use the default "Bitmob" one if you'd like, but that may look too plain and generic if others are doing the same.
(continue reading to learn more about the whatchamacallit WYSIWYG editor)
