Rocketry Planet

Every month, Rocketry Planet serves between 70,000 and 90,000 unique individual hobby rocketry enthusiasts around the world, a number 7-to-9 fold greater than the combined membership of the two largest United States hobby rocketry organizations. We have people who visit this web site every month from the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere, from all of the Americas, from Europe and Asia, from Africa and Australia.

While many may assume the discussion forums are the most popular destination on Rocketry Planet, the statistics show that the discussion forums are a minor destination for the majority of this web site's visitors since the ease of adding RSS News Feeds to a web site has become such an attraction for web site operators everywhere. The number of times the Rocketry Planet Newsdesk headlines are distributed around the world each day is untold, given also that most popular email clients now support RSS News Feeds as well. Given that reality, the majority of enthusiasts in hobby rocketry around the world are reading the news published here.

Every week, sometimes as often as every day, hobby rocketry news is made, whether it be in the form of a new product announcement, an organizational news release, details of a popular launch, an exciting high profile rocket flight or any number of hobby rocketry-related topics. While the Rocketry Planet discussion forums have a group of very talented individuals called "moderators" who police the fora, the articles on the Newsdesk and Features sections are solely produced by the web site's editor. The intent of these guidelines is to give those entities who wish to share their news with the global hobby rocketry community a standardized method of article submission that will make it easier for the editor to accomplish this task as well as reduce the time frame that often occurs when submitting articles for publication.

1. The articles should be in a format that is easy to transform into plain ASCII text. A Microsoft® Word document, an Adobe® PDF generated from a word processor that can generate optical character recognition enabled output, a TXT file made with Microsoft Notepad or Wordpad, or even a plain text or HTML email are all examples of file formats that can be copy-and-pasted into a plain text editor for construction of the article.

2. The articles should be submitted with at least one (1) image that will be used to make the 250 pixel by 250 pixel square image that is published with the article on the homepage of this web site. This image should not be embedded into the article itself, but should be attached separately to the email containing the article. This image does not have to be square as submitted, it just needs to be capable of being cropped into a square orientation for use on the home page, therefore it should be at least 250 pixels in its smallest dimension, either height or width. Larger photos are preferred.

3. The articles should be submitted with a copy of your entity's logo file, either with a) a transparent background, b) a white background or preferably c) a layered Adobe Photoshop®-type file, if and only if you are fairly certain Rocketry Planet's editor does not already have a copy of your entity's logo. If Rocketry Planet has published an article for you within the past 12 months, there is the possibility the editor already has your logo, but it can't hurt to supply one of the three requested formats so that the Rocketry Planet image logo library can be updated.

4. Any images that are to be published with the article should be attached separately to the email containing the submission as well. Do not embed images in Microsoft Word documents or Adobe PDF files, as the ability to extract them for use on the web creates poor quality results and contribute to the length of time it takes to create and publish your article. You can also zip all the images into one archival file and send the single attachment.

5. All articles should be submitted to the email address This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it . This way, internal email filters route the submissions or followup discussions about a submission into separate folders, making article queuing easier to accomplish. If you send your submissions to any other email address, the editor has to find them and manually move them around, and some may even be sent directly to the deleted files folder by anti-spam software, unseen by or unknown to anyone.

Many of the manufacturers and vendors of hobby rocketry products who have benefited from having their news published here will tell you how successful their results have been. One manufacturer wrote Rocketry Planet stating he sold out his entire kit line within 24 hours of a special product promotion being published on the Newsdesk here. Another manufacturer wrote saying a single product review published recently saved his company financially the month the review was published. In our economy, Rocketry Planet is glad to do its part.

Note: Article submissions for the Features pages still benefit from the Free T-Shirt Program, sponsored by Graphix & Stuff, for readers who contribute articles for publication. That program will continue to be used to reward individual fliers who take the time to document a rocketry product review, a project's constructions, a trip to an interesting rocketry-oriented destination, etc., although all article contributions should come through the same article submission channel.

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