Authoring Online Articles

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Online articles should be delivered in a text file called page.src.txt. You can just store your article, together with your figures, in a .zip or .tar.gz article and send it directly to your editor. To make things simpler for our readers, listings are just embedded directly in the article's code; our system automatically reformat long listings so that they won't take up too much screen space.

You should always use a UTF-8-compliant text editor to create your text files. This will ensure that all special characters are encoded properly for our system to read.

Your article should be composed of two sections: the masthead and the body.

The Masthead

The masthead of your article must contain three elements:

A title
A byline, which indicates the name of the author
A deck, which provides a brief “teaser” for the article

For example, suppose you're writing an article on connecting to a MySQL database; your masthead could look something like the following:

Listing 1 – Toggle plain text mode – Select listing

=t=Connecting to a MySQL Database=t=
=b=Marco Tabini=b=
=d=Ever wondered in how many ways you can connect to a MySQL database?
Authors of online articles have been debating this very topic ever
since MySQL was first developed!
This article explores the many facets of database connections—from
''mysql_connect()'' all the way to PDO.=d=

As you can see, Ceres uses special tags to indicate the beginning and end of each element. For example, the =t= tag is used to indicate the beginning and end of the title, while =b= indicates the beginning and end of the byline, and =d= indicates the beginning and end of the deck.

Note that you cannot have any line breaks inside the title or byline. Line breaks are, however, allowed inside the deck.

CONTINUED >

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