Writing Posts

Writing and posting stories and other content should be the main focus of your work in Largo, not dealing with confusing technology. If you've never worked with WordPress, you'll want to read through this section to get insight into how to maximize the focus on content and minimize the confusion. We'll also cover the unique things Largo brings to the table for news publishing.

Our guidance for creating posts starts with one simple recommendation:

Don't Write Your Story Inside WordPress

We strongly advise that you write the text of your story outside WordPress, then copy and paste it into a new post. WordPress has some safeguards against posts getting lost in the middle of composing them and it's improved with each new version. But computers, browsers, and network connections can crash with no warning, so composing posts in your favorite word processing software is generally the best practice.

We recommend using Google Docs for writing posts, as text formatting applied  there  transfers over the WordPress seamlessly in most cases. Microsoft Word is a reasonable choice for composing text, although it tends to add extra line breaks and sometimes odd formatting when pasted into WordPress.

Whatever text tool you use, it's a good idea to save the original story on your computer or other local or cloud-based storage. After all, your reporting work is the most important thing!

Save Your Image Files and Other Media

You will be uploading story images into WordPress. If posting audio or video, you'll be hosting the web version of the files on a service like YouTube, Vimeo, or SoundCloud. The images and media published to your site are formatted for delivery on the web, which means their file sizes are compressed.

This necessarily means a loss of quality, and while the compressed media will perform just fine in a desktop browser or mobile device, you can never restore its resolution, size, and quality to the source media. If you ever need to use the source media files again, for example to re-crop an image or publish a different size, you'll want to work with the original files.

Saving your text, images, and other media files can be challenging, but recreating them may be impossible.

On to the Fun Stuff

The next few pages provide a guided tour of this thing in WordPress called the Post Edit Screen. Work through this and you're about to become a master at posting stories.