3 Ways to Submit Stories to Netscape

Voting and commenting on stories is easy enough and a lot of our members participate in the Netscape community at this level. However, a large percentage of our members don't ever bother to submit a story. In case the process is unclear, I thought I'd write this post explaining three different ways you can submit stories to Netscape, walking you through the process, step by step.

Method 1: Submit a Story / Upload a Video

Figure 1: My member information box followed by our universal navigation links.

When you are logged in to Netscape, your member information box (Figure 1) will be displayed at the top of the right-hand column, followed by some universal navigation links. This list provides several navigational tools (a link to your profile page, your friends, your messages, and a place to find new stories in the Tracker), but for our purposes in this tutorial, the two top options, Submit a Story and Upload a Video, are the most important.

To submit a story to Netscape click on one of these links. Since this is mostly about submitting regular stories, click on Submit a Story.

More after the jump...


Figure 2: Fill in the basic required information for your story.

Here you enter the URL of the story you want to submit. This can be a news story you spotted somewhere else or an article that you want to bookmark on Netscape for later reading. If this URL matches another story that has already been submitted to Netscape, the link to that story will appear, so that you can go to that story and vote and comment on it.

Assuming that the story is not a duplicate of a previous entry, you then must give your story a title. Make sure you pick a title that is descriptive and accurate. If you are submitting a highly opinionated article, we ask that you begin the title with OpEd to avoid confusion. Then you can type a description of the story (350 characters maximum) detailing why you think the story is of interest, telling others how you found the story, or quoting a small bit of text from the story. Finally, select the Channel that best categorizes your story and add some tags, then click on the Check My Story link.


Figure 3: The Story Preview page where you can preview your story, check for duplicates, and fine tune / correct your submission.

Once you click Check This Story, you will be taken to the Story Preview page. This page will display a preview of the way your story will appear on Netscape. After the Story Preview, you will see a list of similar stories. It's important to check in this section for duplicate stories, as sometimes the same AP News story can appear on both AOL, Yahoo!, and various other news sources with different URLs that the initial duplicate check on the previous screen will not catch. If you are certain that your story is not a duplicate, then you can procede to the New Story Information section. If you spotted any typos or mistakes in the Story Preview at the top of the page, you can correct them here . Click Check This Story once you are done if you wish to recheck your slightly edited story. If everything looks good to go, then go ahead and click on Submit This Story. The story will load as it will appear on Netscape.

Method 2: Use the bookmarklet:

Figure 4: You can grab the Submission Bookmarklet from the Story Submission page.

If you are looking for a way to speed up the story submission process, we've provided a Submission Bookmarklet for Netscape in the right-hand column of the Story Submission page, underneath the universal navigation links (Figure 4). Simply click and hold on the Submit to Netscape button, then drag it to the bookmarks bar on your browser. Now, whenever you are on a webpage that you would like to submit to Netscape, simply highlight some of the text of the page that you want to submit, and click on the Submit to Netscape bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar. This will open the Story Submission page with the URL and Title of the story pre-populated with information and any text you highlighted on the page will be placed in the story summary section for easy quoting. The rest of the submission process is the same as with Method 1.


Figure 5: The Submit to Netscape bookmarklet as it appears in Firefox's bookmark bar.

Method 3: Site bookmarklets:

We're in the process of developing a Netscape API that we can open up to everyone so that you can better integrate our site with your site, program, or personal blog. In the meantime, there are some things out there on the web that are already taking advantage of our openness. Our own Navigator, Neophile, whipped up a nice plugin for WordPress bloggers, that adds a Netscape bookmarklet tool to every post on their blogs. I use it on my site (Figure 6). This enables your readers to easily submit and vote on stories from your site on Netscape.


Figure 6: Integrated Netscape bookmarklet on a WordPress blog.

I think that covers all the basics. Let us know if you have any pointers in the comments or suggestions as to how we could make the story submission process better.