Tools/How To

Quick Links Tutorial

All you want to know about adding links to articles on other sites The goal of quick links is to provide links to news and op-eds that our readers will want to see.

Now, when you post a quicklink, you get credit for it. The links you post are added to the quicklinks section of your member page. This also builds accountability to the community into the posting of quicklinks.

Basic quicklink instructions: log in, click on quicklink tab, click on submit quicklinks button,  fill in fields as instructed below and, hopefully, find an image to add using our commonsSearch image find and insert tool. 

Select the category of article:

News-- political updates, breaking news, interesting news, human interest, major stories the Mainstream media (MSM) are covering. Some business fits here , some goes to life-arts-science

Best of the web op-eds-- the best ideas, perspectives, insights, from the best thinkers, from bloggers, blog communities like dkos, mydd, from MSM, from magazines, etc.

Life Arts Science Some business, arts, music, theater, movies, book reviews, living, cooking, dining, travel, technology, fun, advice, psychology, health... etc.

Titling the article

Unless the author is pretty well known, like Krugman, a senator, or very famous person, like Vidal, Moyers, Arundhati Roy, I don't usually include the name. If it is someone well known, and its a Best of the web OpEd, just put the name first, with a colon, like this, for the title. Joe Famous: Why Bush Sucks For news, as is the convention in the news business/journalism go with titles that either you create or that are the ones used by the site you are linking to.

Description: 430 characters to describe the article. use a snippet from the article or create your own description. No foul language in the description. (ie., fuck, shit, and other words with that level of expletive intensity. Hell, damn, bastard are okay.)

Tags select relevant tags-- at least one. If you're in a hurry, just select one. 

Groups  if the article is relevant to one of the groups you have selected to have a relationship with on the site, select the group (or groups) so the article will appear on the group page(s)

Show on Home page? If an article is really only of interest to people interested in certain subjects, locations or groups, you can select the subjects, locales and groups and unclick the home page box, so the article only appears on the "inside pages" you have selected. Please use this option if you know the article is too specific for general readers in 50 states and 165 countries.

When you are finished, click the ADD QUICKLINK button. If you have your own blog or website, our policy is to expect you to post one quicklink for every article you publish on our site. There is no limit to the number of quicklinks you can post to articles that are not from you or your site. 

Some Rules for Quicklinks

We encourage you to post loads of links to solid articles  you've discovered that you feel our readers would value.

We have different rules for content you've written.

1- linking to your site or your content on other sites. 

a) Generally, if you have an article, we want the full article, not a link to the article on your site. We will tolerate one quicklink for each full article you post to our site. DO NOT post more quicklinks to your own work than articles. This is a reason to lose your posting privileges, ie., banning. Bottom line, you can post, on any day, one article you have written, and then, if you've posted an article, one quicklink to another article at your website.

b) hate, porn, sexually explicit content, links to these on other sites are not tolerated on sites we allow links to.

c) Self promotion or commercial promotion is not permitted. Obvious articles promoting products or commercial services are not permitted-- to be posted or linked to.

d) Of course we expect great writing of complete articles or blogs, not links to a paragraph.