We’ve recently had our first two EC’s published and have a question about the publication procedure, which seems a bit clunky.
After filling out the info on the EC site, which doesn’t allow for a lot of text, doesn’t give you the ability to preview layout, and doesn’t provide a clean inclusion of graphics (from our experience at least), the earthcache reviewers publish the cache, then send you an adoption form.
But since the cache is published when you get the form, it is live, even though the cache page might look like crap. It takes some time to fix it and clean it up, but of course all the “new cache” notifications have already gone out and the new-EC seekers are already on the trail.
I always prepare mine on a blank GC cache page (which I keep around for just such a reason-it is never published, but rather used as my bogus writeup page…) so I can see what it will look like. Once I get it to look right on the bogus GC page I copy my work from there to the EC submission form. But at the same time I also prepare all my pages in HTML first as well so I know exactly how it will look.
I did that but the problem is when I copied text into there I exceeded the word count. Mabye that means I need to be less verbose… 😆
Also, their picture upload didn’t work at all, so it was back to hosting pictures elsewhere and then including img tags in the HTML, which of course took up more text.
I don’t upload the images to their site, I upload to the bogus sample page then when the listing goes live I host the images on the newly listed page…that way the picture will show up when the EC lists (you just relocate the pic to your new page later).
I exceeded the word count too…I left a note to the approver telling them I needed to add the remainder of the text and they set the cache up so that I had to activate it.