To begin the program, we'll go to the web address of the Max News system on your website. This will almost always be in the form of:

You will also find this statement:

"Important Note: It is essential that you do NOT use the BACK button on your browser in the following pages. If you do, you will probably see a message that says "Warning: Page has Expired." This will not happen as long as you use the buttons provided. Thus, there's really no need to use the BACK button. "

Hopefully, that is self-explanatory. All the buttons you need are included on the webpages. Please do NOT use the BACK (or FORWARD) buttons on your browser. This caveat is necessary because the system can lose data unless you use the navigation buttons provided on the Max News pages.

(Technical note: Actually, it won’t lose data, but it can appear that way because of warning messages that may appear if you use the BACK button on your browser.)

After entering your userid and password, you come to the "Control Panel" of the Max New system. This is the main operating page. The first time you come here, you’ll want to use the Add a New Article button. So let’s not look at the other elements of this page just yet. Just hit the Add a New Article button.

Entering Articles

When you do, you’ll see a page that asks for:

• Article Name
• Author Name
• Issue
• Page Name
• Summary (also called "Abstract")
• Article

Let’s go over these.

Article Name is the title of the articles as you want it to appear on the webpage that will be created. Author Name is self-evident. In the Issue field, you enter a name that identifies the issue. For example, you could enter ‘vol1’ or ‘vol2.’ Or perhaps you’d like to use ‘issue1’ or ‘issue2.’ It doesn’t matter what you call it. It just means that each article with that same identifier will be included in the issue with that name.

The Page Name is a name you assign to the article, to identify the article. For example, if you had an article called "Finding the Joy In Your World," you might want to use a Page Name of ‘joy’ or perhaps ‘findingjoy.’

The form field called Summary (also called "Abstract") is meant to be a summary description of the article. It is suggested that this be written in such a way as to encourage the reader to want to read the article. The "abstracts" are used when we create a "starting page" for each issue (see the Creating Issue(s) section.)

And of course, the main article itself is entered (usually copy-pasted) into the form field called "Articles." Of course, you could type the whole article right here, but that’s pretty clumsy – so most people would use a word-processing program and then copy-paste the article here.

Note that no TAB characters are allowed in the article. The TAB character is a special character used by the system, and will be converted to a SPACE character if used.

And that’s it. Now just hit the Add Article button, and the article gets added to the database of articles on your website. You next see a screen which shows you what you entered.

Adding Pictures

If you want a picture associated with the article, here is where you can do that. The idea is that you can have a small picture on the article page (called a "thumbnail") and when that smaller picture is clicked on, it shows the larger picture. So the suggestion is to have a relatively small picture appear in the article which can be clicked on to show a picture as large as you like (within limits.)

Note: you don’t have to have a picture with your article. And if you have only one photo, you don’t have to add 2. Just one is fine.

You add the pictures to the article by clicking on either Attach Small Image or Attach Large Image. When you do, you’ll see a popup screen which asks you for the location of the picture on your computer’s hard drive (or wherever.) After selecting the picture, you MUST hit the Upload button to put the picture in the database with your article.

Technical Note: The picture isn’t automatically shown as part of the article. The "article template" must include an [IMAGE] marker. If someone else setup your system for you, this was likely already included.

List of Articles You've Added

At this point, you go back to the Control Panel. And what do you see? You see your article in the list of articles. Only one is there, if this is the first article you’ve entered, but the list will expand as you add more articles.

Let’s look at this list:

It shows you the Article Name, Issue and Page Name. When you click on the word View on the same line as the Article Name, it shows you what the article will look like when you Create Issue(s). When you click on the word Modify on the same line as the Article Name, it takes you to a screen that looks just like the Add Articles screen. Here’s where you can make changes to the article, if you need to. You can also choose to Remove the article completely, if you wish. You would put a check mark in the Remove column, and then click the Delete Checked Article(s) button at the bottom of the list. (It’s unlikely that you’ll want to do this, very often.)

Note that word Article Name at the very top of the list in the colored row can be clicked on. If you do so, it will show you the list sorted by Article Name. The same is true of the words Issue and Page Name. You can sort the list by Issue or Page Name.

Now suppose you have lots of articles. Say you have 50 articles. Or even more. You probably don’t want the whole list on one page. So the list is "page-inated." This means you only see a certain number at one time, say 30. You can hit the Next and Back words, in order to see more of the list. This number is configurable. You can set it to be whatever you like.

What about the other buttons on this page? You can find out more here:

Now, let’s look at the Create Issue(s) operation….