We hope you'll want to add your events to the PAA online calendar to make it easy for others to learn about them. Events on our calendar show up automatically in the upcoming events list in the right column of our home page. Also, we place events entered here in the middle column of our home page as date for the event gets close, to give it more prominence. In addition, we include these events in our "Upcoming Progressive Events" e-mail sent to our announcements list every week or two.

Submitting your own event is easy:

1. Click on the "Submit an event" link at the top of the right column of the PAA home page at http://progressiveactionalliance.org

2. Fill in the boxes in the next page that comes up. You may leave some boxes blank if they do not apply, such as "Event web site" and "Event fee" (if there's no charge to attend). Be sure to include either a phone number or e-mail address for people who want more information, although you don't have to provide both.

3. Be sure to make the title descriptive. This is what shows up in the monthly calendar at http://paa-tx.org/event and in the upcoming events listing in the right column of the PAA home page. Don't make the title something ambiguous like "Special event-please come". You don't need to put the date in the title, because it will show up in the date field. A descriptive title also makes the event and its details easier to find with the Search capabilities of our web site, even long after an event has happened.

4. Add whatever text you want in the description box. It can be long, but put the most important information in the first paragraph, because that's what will appear on our home page when we move your event notice there as the date of the event approaches. If you include a web link somewhere (Http://...), be sure NOT to put a period immediately following it, or else a link will not be created automatically. If the link is at the end of a line, it's best to follow it with a space before entering a Return character.

5. Watch for these common problems:

5a. Date and Time: Be sure to enter the correct day and time for the event. It defaults to the current day and time, so if you don't fill this in, then the event won't show up on the calendar in the right place and no one will know when it occurs.

5b. For the location, in the Street address field, be sure to put ONLY a street number and street name ("100 Main St."), OR an intersection ("Main St. at Montrose Blvd."). If you add something else, like "1/2 block north of ...", then the Google map generator won't work to help people find your event. You can put brief comments - anything you want in the next line, labeled "Additional". Be sure to specify BOTH the city and the state so the map generator will work.

5c. Use the default (plain) text editor for the event description box. Do NOT click on the link for the rich-text (html) text editor. It has bugs in it and often causes more problems than it's worth. If you know how to use html tags, you can manually insert them into the text.

6. Click on the Preview button at the bottom of the form and make sure everything looks right at the top of the preview page that comes up next. If anything needs correcting, scroll down below the preview pane and fix whatever you need to.

7. *** VERY IMPORTANT *** Click on the "Submit" button at the very bottom after checking everything with Preview. If you don't do this, your event submission will be lost. On the other hand, if things have become all garbled up and you want to start over, just hit the back button on your web browser and you can re-enter everything.

If you have questions or problems, or want us to upload a flyer or other attachment to your event notice (attachments should be in pdf format), e-mail one of these people:

c.lee.

To enter your event information now, click on this link: http://www.paa-tx.org/event/submit

Remember that you can find this help page again under the "FAQs" (Frequently Asked Questions) tab at the top of any page of our web site. Thanks for using the PAA online event calendar.