PSP3D.com Editor's Guide
Welcome to the PSP3D.com Editor's Guide. Here you will find most, if not all the information you'll need to get up and writing for PSP3D.com (and future 3D sites). In this brief guide, we'll be covering the basics of our writing style, how and where to link, image creation and tagging, extra coding and formatting for game & accessory stories, and how to get your stories into our vBulletin backend. Welcome aboard, and let's get started.

Basic Writing Style
While we do like to have fun writing our stories, we tend to keep a news-oriented, professional voice. This means very proper grammar and spelling, but with a personal, friendly tone. For Press Releases and cited news stories (where you link to another site), the most important thing to do is present the information in a more readable and non-biased way.

Headlines
For news story headlines, you should follow the general, long-standing rule for headlines: use as few words as possible while summarizing in a clear fashion. You must write in the present tense and use active verbs. A couple good primers on headlines can be found here and here. Basically, the headline needs to provide the reader with a summary of the story using strong and descriptive words. As for capitalization, only the beginning word and company and product titles should be in capitals. All other words should be in lowercase.

A bad headline: Sony has announced a bunch of new PlayStation 3 games
A good headline: Sony announces new PlayStation 3 games

How and Where to Link
Linking is one of the most important things we do. It allows us to share new information with our readers, and is also useful in building good relationships with other sites. It is, however, very important that you understand how to use linking to your advantage. Here, we will show you a couple of examples so you can get a feel for what we mean.

Here's a a story about an update to the PSP Firmware 3.00 news. This is how the entry would look as you were writing it in your text editor:

A few emails have been submitted to us suggesting that the 3.00 firmware update will be released on November 21st/22nd, based on a quote from <a href="http://0okm.blogspot.com/2006/11/psp-fw-300-will-release-on-2006-11-22.html">Tetsuhiko Yasuda from Sony Computer Entertainment Asia</a>. This looks like legitimate information. Get ready, if you have a PS3 already, this update is going to make PSP to PS3 connectivity a blast (with the anticipated remote playing capabilities as well as the PS1 game downloads).

Notice that we didn't cite a source, but instead linked directly to them with the keywords "announced the delay." Now look at the same story in it's online setting (shown right):

Not only is linking the keywords important to keep consistency across our network, it also make a difference when Google and other search engines come calling. Always try to make the keywords "action words" (such as "announced the delay") or "product/noun words" (such as "Ape Escape 3") and remember that a good summary doesn't necessary have to name its source, as long as you link to it. Also note that we don't link back to most Press Releases.

Source Links
Some other linking situations that you need to be ready for are the "Source" links. Here at PSP3D.com, we like to keep our source links down in size, so we link the word Source inside of a pair of brackets. For instance, if we were going to give a via link to GameSpot, the code in your text editor would look like this:

[<a href="http://www.gamespot.com/">Source</a>]

Simple and efficient, and of course online all the reader gets is this: [Source]

Quoting
If a PR or news story is long, it is perfectly acceptable to quote any lengthy, but nicely worded portions, but always remember to summarize at least the most important points of the release before you quote. Simply italicize the quotation and add quotation marks around the quote in the story.

Image Creation and Tagging
Images are one of the most important aspects of any story. Even if the story only requires a thumbnail image (as most news stories do) it is still important that you get the most clean, crisp, and enticing image you can to help draw readers into the story.

Image File Naming and Saving
It is important that you name your image in a proper way. You should space multiple words with a dash (-) like so: sony-psp-camera.jpg

Also, remember that if you are using Photoshop to edit your images, be sure to use the "Save for Web" option (set for JPG at 70% quality) from the File menu. If you're not using Photoshop, please find the proper output setting on the application so that the image file size is small, but with a good, crisp look.

Articles/Featured
At this time, just send your entire story and pictures to joe@psp3d.com for reviewing. We will post it up.

Getting Your Stories Into vBulletin
For all frontpage news articles, simply login and make a post in the "Homepage News" forum catagory. The WYSIWYG editor makes the process of formatting stories simple.

Proper Story Format
In each story, you will need to include the following:

Brief summary of the news/release.
Example: "XXXXX has just released [name of game/whatever] blah blah. [What the release of product does, what the news is about, and how its useful/good]. Great work [coder]/ Another awesome release by [company]."

Story image. A picture speaks 10,000 words in this case.

A quote or features list.

Download or source links. Download links must follow the source link format:

[<a href="http://fileupper.com/files/18/update%203.00.pbp">Download</a>]

Make sure each news story looks juicy. It must have a nice text-to-image ratio. Not enough text can make the image overwhelming. Easy ways to improve length is to change abbreviations to full names, for example PSP to PlayStation Portable, if the summary is too short. If it's too long, you can do the opposite, or simply use shorter words.

Other Questions
For all other questions you might have about writing your stories or any other problems you might run into, simply contact Robert (AIM: bob1919a/AfnaniCRAVE), Cody (cody@psp3d.com), or Joe (joe@psp3d.com), and we'll be happy to help you out. Welcome to the PSP3D.com (3D Net) team!