All The World's a Blog Platform

by KJ@theonlycolors on Dec 9, 2010 8:40 PM CST in Michigan State Spartans News Roundup

We've added a large number of readers and commenters over the last few months, so I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a quick refresher on how to use the FanPost/FanShot features available on the SBNation platform. These features are a big part of what makes TOC a full-fledged fan community.

A FanPost is your chance to be a real, live blogger, without all the hassle of maintaining your own website. Have a story/theory/scatterplot on MSU athletics you haven't seen the TOC staff cover? Write it up. A FanPost should be at least a few paragraphs long and develop some sort of narrative you think other readers will find of interest. It doesn't have to be a full-fledged made-for-the-front-page contribution; it can be nichey. But it should be more than the kind of quick observation you'd put in in the comments section. Technical directions for composing a FanPost are here, but it's fairly intuitive.

A FanShot is for sharing a news story, blog post, image, or video you've seen elsewhere and think will be of interest to the TOC readership. While a FanShot shouldn't contain lengthy commentary (if it does, it should be a FanPost), do include a couple sentences explaining why you think the linked material is worth clicking through to. Again, the technical aspects of composing a FanShot are pretty straightforward. Click across the options at the top to get to the correct type of FanShot and then fill in all the little boxes in the editing window.

Also, this ain't exactly the New York Times, but something resembling proper capitalization and punctuation is helpful to the reader--and significantly increases the chances your work will get bumped to the site's front page.

Related: I am going to the hockey game on Saturday. I know almost nothing about hockey--and even less about the current edition of the MSU hockey team. 500 bonus points* to whoever FanPosts an informed MSU-side preview of the game by 9:00 a.m. on Saturday.

*TOC bonus points have no cash value, but are exchangeable for S&H Green Stamps.

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I know a fair amount about hockey

Comes with the territory growing up in Minnesota. But I haven’t seen enough this year to write up a good preview. Just the series at Western (which was one part awesome, two parts suck, and three parts Western sending out the goon squad and the refs completely losing control of the game; in the early ’90s before the NCAA cracked down on fighting and made it an automatic suspension, there would have been at least three fights on Saturday).

I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left-hand side.
Bradley-Terry rankings for college football and basketball: because there aren't enough computer rankings already.

by SpartanDan on Dec 9, 2010 9:32 PM CST reply actions