Getting Started with Ningin Voices

Welcome to Ningin Voices, a blog where Ningin users have the freedom to express themselves in the world of Asian entertainment and pop culture. Every published Ningin Voices blog post earns you RPs (reward points) for use in our Mixr Reward Center. Before starting, read these important details.

What to Blog About
There are 7 different subjects that we cover on Ningin and Ningin Voices; KPOP, JPOP, Anime, Drama, Movies, Games and Asian Culture (anything Asian-related that doesn’t fit with the other 6 subjects). If you’ve come across a great article, seen an interesting video, listened to a great Asian song or anything Asian-related that you’d like to share with the rest of the Ningin community, Ningin Voices is a great place to share content! We only ask that you do not blog about news but offer your unique opinions and thoughts instead. Also, be sure to give credit to anything that isn’t originally yours.

How to Start Blogging
1) Activate your Voices account if you haven’t already.
2) Click “Write” which is also found on the side area of this blog.
3)If you’ve used Wordpress before, everything is pretty straightforward.

To learn more about Wordpress, you can visit their website which has extensive
documentation on use: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons

Bolding, Tags & Auto-Tagging
Although simple, tags and tagging are very important functions of the Mixr network. The tags in your post defines the trending topics on our sites. In simplest terms, tags are the proper nouns. More specifically they are the proper nouns of key importance to your post. If in doubt of a tag, here’s another rule of thumb: If it has a Wikipedia entry, it’s probably ok to use it as a tag. Here’s an example:

Post Title - Lady Gaga to be featured on the hit TV show Glee.
Possible Tags - Lady Gaga, Glee, Sue Sylvester.
Bad Tags - tv show, Fox, musical, songs, drama, teens, good show, humor, hit, featured,
announcement, breaking.

Tags/proper nouns are also words in a blog post that need to bolded. Proper nouns mentioned multiple times throughout a blog post need only be bolded the first time they are mentioned in a blog post. To save yourself time in creating tags, all words that are bolded automatically become tags with the use of the Auto-Tag function. After all the necessary words are bolded, simply click on the ‘Auto Tag’ button located in the upper-right hand corner of the body text box. Voila, your tags are created in a flash!

Categories
For organizational purposes, every blog post must have a category. Categories and tags are often mistaken for each other. The difference between categories and tags is that categories are broad by design and tags provide granularity. Categories are also predefined and every blog post must fall under categories that are already set in place. Your blog post may have more than one category. If you find that your blog post does not fall under a category, your blog post is most likely irrelevant to the site.

The More Code
Don’t forget to add the “More” code! There is a “More” button on your editing screen next to “code” and “Youtube” button. This button inserts a piece of code that will break a blog post into two parts, the intro and the extended text. Only the intro will appear on the blog homepage and in the blog’s RSS feed. It should be used after the first or second paragraph of your blog post. Every blog post should have this.

Done writing? Check your work!
1) Make sure to include a title, more code, tags and check off the appropriate
category(ies).
2) Refer to the bottom of the right column of the page for a checklist of details.
3) Use the “Preview This Post” button after writing the post to see how it’ll look after
going live.

Submit Your Post for Review:
1) Under Publish Status (in the right column), click “Submit for Review”.
2) You can’t edit posts after they’ve been published, but you can edit them while they are
in Pending Review. To do so, find your post via the Manage tab and click on your post’s title.
3) Make the changes, and hit save again. You can also switch
your post back to your drafts section (”Unpublished” via the drop-down menu in the
Publish Status section.)

Uploading Images
Upload all images via a third party image hosting service such as imgur, tinypic, imageshack, etc. Note: Facebook, Myspace and Flickr are not image hosting services. DO NOT HOTLINK photos from other websites!

Inserting YouTube Video
1. Click the Youtube button above the write window. A box will pop-up for you to add
the URL of the Youtube video you want to insert.
2. Click OK after you’re done and the Youtube code will appear in the text editor.

This only works for Youtube. We might support other video sites later, but there is no current plans as of now to do so. You can use this method to include as many videos as you want in a single blog post. Posting with only a Youtube video will not be published.

Plagiarism
Plagiarism, or copying content from other sources without citation, is bad. It’s not allowed in school nor is it allowed here. You also can’t get away with plagiarism as we have a plagiarism detector in place that checks every blog post before it gets published. If your blog post receives a red flag for plagiarism, your blog post will not publish and you will not receive RPs.

Whew. This looks like a lot, but it’s actually a breeze once you’ve tried it out.