helpful hints and guidelines for posts on EC

I think that things are going very well here at the new Electronic Cottage. I am quite happy with the contributed articles bulletin items. You are doing great!
When you submit an article, interview, review, bulletin, etc. you can help me out and make my job as EC Editor a lot easier, more enjoyable, and less tedious if you will do the following:

YOU MUST ALWAYS include a picture or photo of some kind with your item.
I am going to insist on this from now on, and you can consider it mandatory.

Pictures draw people in and pique their interest. Some people are afraid of big blocks of text on a web page.
Please attach a high resolution picture or pictures of some sort to the email that contains the text of your item.
It will also be VERY HELPFUL if you will indicate within your text where each picture should go.
Number your photos in the order that you want them to appear within the article.
Don't send me a bunch of photos attached to an email and expect me to figure out the order.

Please proofread your article or other text items before you email them to me. It is your responsibility to make sure that your article is FACTUALLY CORRECT and not riddled with obvious errors, such as typos, misspellings, and other careless stuff.
If I look at your text and see numerous misspellings and obvious punctuation errors I will reject your text and tell you to fix it before re-submitting it.
I'm not going to fuss over every little punctuation mark, because I'm not always very good at it myself.
Grammatical aberrations don't bother me either. 

- European/British spellings such as 'favourite' and 'grey' are fine with me.
- always use the upper case 'I' for the first person pronoun -- not 'i'.
- in contractions make sure that the apostrophe goes between the 'n' and the 't', not before the 'n'.
- Your sentence construction doesn't have to be perfect, just coherent.
- Do not put two spaces at the beginning of a sentence. This habit is a leftover from the days when we used typewriters, and we're not going to do it at EC.

I TOTALLY understand that for many of you English is a second language, and that it will be difficult to always make your articles conform to the above standards or suggestions. I will be more lenient with you than I will be with Americans or Brits.

Many of you have already sent to me nearly perfect texts on which I need to make few corrections or adjustments. These articles make me happy!
Articles that will require fewer edits by me will get top priority, quite simply because they will be easier to publish.

I really really enjoy laying out articles and constructing web pages and blog posts. It is a lot of fun for me! It's not fun when I have to correct a bunch of stuff that I shouldn't have to be bothered with.

The above is not just meant to be a bunch of bitching. I'm trying to keep EC FUN, and that is VERY IMPORTANT. I will appreciate it if you can please do all of the above things because if you follow the guidelines above it will save me a lot of time and tedious effort and it will enhance MY PERSONAL FUN.

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