Has it ever happened to you that right after you published your story, a new one slided in , almost in no time. The temptation of seeing your work in print is hard to resist. Ghumakkar displays stories on its home page based on time of publishing, so a recent story would be featured on top, though we have enough feedback to suggest that we should let Ghumakkar editors control the top of the shelf space. While internally we debate more on this, here’s a small step-by-step which might work, if all of us try to follow this.

Essentially, what you can do is that you can ‘schedule’ your posts to a future date. A small calendar would help you to quickly scan for ‘free dates’ (it sounds like an oxymoron, free dates) and if you (and everyone else) pick a date which is not already taken, then your story would get top-of-the-shelf for probably one full day.

1. After you are done with writing, take a look at the calendar. This is on your right.

2. This calendar shows you the dates in green, these are the days on which a post is already scheduled. Do not pick them. Once you find a date, then instead of clicking ‘publish’ button, click ‘Edit’ adjacent to ‘Publish Immediately’. Choose a future day and time. In the below example, I chose June 02, 2010 at 0600 hrs.

3. As you press OK, you would notice that [Publish] button has changed to [Schedule]. Click it.

The calendar is just an added convenience, the feature to schedule your stories was there all the time. The Calendar helps you quickly scan the ‘free dates’. One other way to look at currently scheduled stories is to click at ‘Scheduled’ after you are in ‘Posts’ views/

A post could be one of the following viz Published, Scheduled, Drafts, Trash.

Click on image above to see it in big size

You should be able to look at currently scheduled posts by clicking on ‘Scheduled’.

Typically Ghumakkar doesn’t get more than one post every day, so if we all choose a free day, we get more time at the top of the page. And if you do not find anything scheduled for today and the last story is been there for at least a day, go for instant Nirvana and click [Publish]

Often, we are in a situation where we have visited a number of places as part of some long vacation and when it comes to writing a trvelogue at Ghumakkar, we do not want to write all of it in one single story. In fact the vacation may not be long and you may want to break your short vacation story in few parts. Breaking not only helps you to better focus on each location/place in the right detail but it also helps the reader since not everyone would want to do the same vacation with the same itinerary.

In all these cases, wont it be nice if a reader who reaches any of your stories through a ‘Google Search’ or while browsing the site, is presented with a small ‘Table of Content’ with links of the all the stories of that particular vacation.

Well, you can do this at Ghumakkar and here’s a small tutorial to achieve this. At the end of this post, I would also give you some links where this is being used at Ghumakkar.

5 Steps to create a series of posts at Ghumakkar

1. Write first post and Save it. Once saved, Edit the post and go to the bottom of the page. You would find two boxes like this

In the left box, choose “New Series” , click ‘Start’ and input a name. Click Save at the top right to save this.

What you have just done is that you have created a new Series and attached your first story with the series. Lets say that you create a new series called “Delhi - Sangla - Kaza - Manali - Delhi”

2. Now go ahead and publish the post.

3. Assuming that you would want to write another post for the same series, write another post/story and after saving again go to bottom.

This time, instead of choosing ‘New Series’, pick the name which you have created last time. See the snapshot below. And select ‘End’.

4. Now suppose you want to add another story, simple repeat the 2nd step. What the software does in the background is that it would make the current ‘End’ as ’2nd Last’ and the latest one as ‘Last’. It all works on the dates so the latest becomes the newest. ‘Start’ is the oldest in the series but in ‘Table of Content’ it appears first.

5. Nothing and enjoy your series of posts and send the link to your best friends. This is what a reader of your story would see if he finds any of your stories.

hope this is useful.If you have any questions please write a small comment below and I would promptly get back to you.

Till then, happy Ghumakkari and happy writing !!

Time to summarize few things so that its more accessible and makes it easy for me to redirect new Ghumakkars here than writing again, lazy me.

How you can keep contributing.

1. Try to write the story at the site itself or in a notepad and not MS-Word. Microsoft puts a lot of formatting information in its documents which are not well understood by web browsers, so simple text works fine.

2. Pick all your pics and then resize them using any image editing program. A smaller pics makes the story load faster, especially on bandwidth challenged places in India. I use http://webresizer.com/resizer/ to resize my pics. A width of 550 pixels works great in current layout. It might look like a pain but all good works involve some pain.

3. Insert pics. Here’s a short tutorial http://jhaji.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-insert-photos-in-wordpress-25.html . Skip the part which talks about resizing since you have already done it using 2.

4. When done, after first para and a pic, click this [more] button.

When you click this button, it inserts a break-point in the story which ensures that the home page only shows a fraction of the story and one has to click on the title or on ‘Click here to read full story” link. When someone does that then the real story page opens, e.g. http://www.ghumakkar.com/2009/08/23/walking-tour-of-isle-of-arran-scotland/ and ‘views’ gets recorded. If you look at the left corner, you would see ‘Recent Most Viewed’ so if your story gets enough views, it reaches there hence any new visitor would have a greater chance to find your story and read further.

and finally, never ever hesitate to write to me for any and everything. If all of the above sound like a big hassle then just write your story, collect your pics and send both to me over e-mail and I would get it done.

Happy Ghumakkari and Happy writing.