How to use FanPosts and FanShots

I wanted to take a moment to remind you all about FanPosts and FanShots.

The most fun part of Bluebird Banter, at least from where I'm sitting, is reading the opinions of others (as opposed to the least fun part which is staring at a blank story editor screen trying to think of something to post). Our FanPost and FanShot areas are suffering from neglect of late. I'd love to see more posts.

How do you put together a Fanpost or Fanshot? Well, first click on the link to the editor, you can find the links on the right side of the page, just a bit below the cover stories. Here I'll circle them in ugly orange for you:

Why do we have two options?

FanShots are for short thoughts, pictures (only pictures of your own please), a quote, a tweet, a link or something like that. And yeah, the FanShots are hidden the bottom of the page.

If you hit the FanShot link, you'll see this:

Pick the type FanShot you doing. After that it is just fill in the blanks.

FanPosts are for longer, more complete thoughts, more like what you see on the front page. I think there is a 75 word minimum on FanPosts. But, if you are like most of us you'll blow way past 75 words.

If you hit the Fanpost link, you'll see this:

Some suggestions:

• Give it a catchy headline, get us interested in reading it.
• Use capital letters at the start of sentences. Break it up into paragraphs. If you write 1000 words and it is all one paragraph, one big block of words, odds our it won't be read. Make it as reader friendly as possible.
• If you Twitter, use the Twitter box to Tweet it out to your followers.
• There are some tools to help you format. You can make words Bold, you can italicize, cross out words,

You can use the fancy quote box, if you are quoting someone.

You can

use

different

sizes

of font, perhaps to do sub-headlings.

• If you write your post in Word you there is a little box (with the 'w') and if you hit it, a little window will open that you can paste your story into and it will fix the formatting to make Word work nicely with the story editor.

Beyond all that, if you have any troubles, you can email your friendly blog manager and he can give you a hand.

What should you write about?

Anything that interests you, as long as it is Blue Jays and/or baseball related. A few suggestions:

• Don't copy and paste a post from somewhere else. If someone else owns the copyright, our ever vigilant mods will delete the post, hopefully before I hear from our humorless wonderful lovely lawyers. The same goes for pictures included in your post, don't borrow them off another site. Much better to link the post you like.
• Remember you are writing for pretty knowledgable people. be prepared to back up your arguments.
• Have a thick skin. Honest, if you aren't ready for your position to be challenged, maybe this isn't the place for you to write. I've had several emails from people saying 'your readers don't like me', and I'll go look at the post and think 'no they like you fine, they just didn't agree with you'. Understand that people won't always agree. And really, if we all agreed, our comment threads would be pretty boring.
• Join in the comment thread for your post. That's the fun of it and, who knows, you might learn something and make some friends.
• No politics or religion.
• And, maybe add race to the list of forbidden subjects.

The good part about doing FanPosts here is we have a pretty decent sized audience. We've had FanPosts that have received thousands of pageviews. It is a lot more fun to write for a large audience compared to writing for a handful of people.

I love reading the FanPosts. I'd love to read more of them.