Style Guide

Rules for posting your stories

Begin your story with your byline and dateline in uppercase (all capital letters), e.g., YOUR NAME. HOLLYWOOD (CINEMA MINIMA) -- . Stories which do not start with your byline + headline will be removed from "publish" to "draft" status.

Select a category for your story — Actors, Art, Festivals, Online, Reviews, Rights, Sound, Story, Tools — the default is Trade, which refers to the business of movie making.

Include the year with dates in your stories, e.g., «2006 July 4 Tuesday» never just «July 4 Tuesday».

Movie titles in uppercase: GONE WITH THE WIND, not “Gone With the Wind,” not Gone With the Wind, not Gone With the Wind.

Do not use boldface or italics or underlines — let your words provide emphasis, not typography. Cinema Minima's stories are syndicated — typographic emphasis interferes with syndication; it may be stripped from your story when syndicated.

Use UPPERCASE for movie titles or for acronyms — nothing else. Do not even think about using uppercase for emphasis.

Upload images — less than 400 pixels square — onto Cinema Minima's own server with the Image Manager button, or link to images which you have uploaded to Flickr. Even an image from your own server may not display in Cinema Minima, on account of network or browser security (anti-spam) measures.

Help

Use the free Firefox Web browser to access all of Cinema Minima's writing and editing features.

Compose your story in the Write page. Do not waste your time using Microsoft Word to format your story — use the built-in Visual Rich Editor, which has the same look-and-feel of Microsoft Word. By default it is disabled; turn it on in the Users>Your Profile page. This works best in the Firefox Web browser.

How to make a bullet list. Use easy Markdown list syntax — instead of HTML — to make lists: start each line with a hyphen, followed by a space, like this:

- An item
- Another item

• An item
• Another item

How put a picture in your story. Click the Image Manager button in the Write page to upload an image and insert it into your story. For more help with Image Manager, visit the Image Manager Help Forum. The Image Manager works best in Firefox Web browser (and may not work at all in some other Web browsers).

To make a line into sub-headline within a story, surround the line with four « # » marks, like this:####This is a sub-headline#### which will render as

This is a subheadline

How to make an em-dash « — ». A double hyphen « -- » will be automatically converted into an em-dash « — ». Please do not separate clauses with single hyphens - like this; use em-dashes instead — like this.

Cinema Minima does not support en-dashes « – »