Creating Your Own Online Newspaper Part III

I'm a bit late on this, but my offline life got in the way these last couple of days.

You have now built your paper and it is feeding you news, but you see an article near the bottom of the page which you think should be featured or you have a perfect image to use as a background or maybe one of the articles really doesn't belong there. In this article we are going to talk about customizing and promoting your paper.

Editing

While you can't rewrite the articles, you can do some editing of your paper. You can reposition some articles and you can delete them.

Repositioning

You have a limited ability to reposition articles by selecting which you would like to be the featured article on the front page. This pushes the featured article either down or to the right. By doing this several times you can create a block of articles you want near the top.

I happen to like to have an article with a strong graphic in that top left position and if the program doesn't provide it I'll just bump something up from the bottom.  Here's how. Just hover your mouse over the bottom right of the article you want to move. You will see something like this:

 

You will see an arrow pointing upward. Click it and that article will go to the top of the page in the featured position. 

Deleting

Next to the arrow is an "x." By clicking that x you can delete an article. For instance, today in this paper I had two links to the same article. 

 

I wanted to get rid of one of them. I clicked the X and I got this menu. I can delete the post or block the person who tweeted the link or block the website. Well, I don't want to block either website or tweeter, but I do want to delete the post. So, I clicked delete. 

When deleting videos, sometimes the "x" is on the left side instead of the right. I don't know why.

Background Image

You can add a background image to your paper or change the color of the background. Here's how. First, you have to enter the settings. In the upper right corner of your screen you will see your twitter profile pix. Right next to it is a down arrow you can click:

When you click it, you find "Paper Settings" with some tabbed options:

You simply select  a background image from your computer. I chose for my Science for Science Fiction Writers something I found at the NASA website. It's pretty and in public domain. I chose not to tile the image which means repeating it over and over since that would look weird. However, I changed the background color of the website from white to black by clicking on the background color icon and sliding the selector all the way down into the black range. What I ended up with was this:

Publication Frequency and Time of Issue

Another setting you can use is the one which sets how often your paper will come out and at what time. This is found under the first tab and looks like this:

You can choose to have a daily edition or by clicking on the pull down box get a morning and evening edition or opt for a weekly edition, which is good if you don't think you'll get enough to fill up a daily. 

You can also choose the time of day this comes out. The default is midnight GMT. But you can change it to your local time and set the time. It uses a 24 hour clock. so 06:00 hours is 6 am while 18:00 is 6 pm. 

Well, this post has gone longer than I expected. I think that I'll come back tomorrow with some ideas about promotion and using your paper to help promote yourself.