The principal function of this site is for webmasters to submit their tutorials for inclusion in our tutorial database... it is the most heavily used section of this site aside from the tutorial index itself. It is important that you do not confuse the submission system with our publishing system. Submitting a tutorial means that you have written a tutorial and it is hosted on your own website, and you wish to submit the link to our tutorial index. The publishing system is a completely different feature of the site, allowing users to write and host their tutorials right on our site for free! This includes hosting of all images, video and attachments relevant to the tutorial.

How to submit a tutorial:

Submitting tutorials to our index is simple and only takes a couple of minutes to submit multiple tutorials to our database. HOWEVER, we do have some policies and guidelines for the submission process that you definitely want to adhere to. Remember, all tutorials are placed in an approval queue that is manually reviewed by P2L staff for acceptance, so submitting tutorials with our guidelines in mind will help assure approval as quickly as possible.

Failure to follow the guidelines will likely result in your tutorial being declined, so please be sure you read them.

Before we begin, let''s look at the submission guidelines:

1. No Public Image Hosting

Due to the high amount of traffic we send to tutorials, we ask that your images and content all be hosted by the same domain that is listed as the sourcesite. Most public hosting websites have bandwidth limitations, and quite frankly you should not trust your content to servers and websites that you have no control over.

2. Some Categories Require RELEVANT Avatars

While choosing a category for your tutorial, you will be informed if you are required to submit an avatar. If you are REQUIRED to submit an avatar, please note that the avatar MUST BE RELEVANT to the tutorial you are submitting. DO NOT submit a generic logo or symbol when an avatar is required, it must be relevant to the tutorial itself. A generic avatar is fine for categories that do not require an avatar.

3. No Nudity or Implied Nudity

Pixel2life is a site used by young people, as well as industry professionals and other groups that should not have to encounter questionable content while using this site. Please do not submit tutorials that contain open nudity or highly suggestive content. If you wouldn''t look at it with your kids, wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, parents or employer looking over your shoulder, then it''s probably not acceptable.

4. Avoid Duplicate Content

We don''t mind having a couple of variations on a similar theme in our index, but if it''s already been done to death, then it will be declined. Tutorials on common items such as how to draw scanlines or shiny orbs in Photoshop are standard fodder we don''t accept. You can see a complete list of common tutorial subjects we decline here.

We do maintain a list of the most common types of tutorials we no longer accept, however the best move is to perform a search on our site to see if your tutorial already exists in slightly different forms. Please view the end of this chapter for the listing of tutorials we do not accept.

Once you are sure your tutorial is relevant, follows our submission guidelines and not repeated several times in our database already, then you''re ready to submit your tutorial to our index!

Step 1:

Are you a registered P2L member? If not, you might want to consider registering before you submit tutorials, but it''s not mandatory... guests can submit tutorials as well. BUT, should you ever wish to edit your tutorials or source site information, or earn P2L credits for approved tutorials, you will need to be a member when submitting content.

You can register a free account at http://www.pixel2life.com/register/

If you are already a member, be sure you are logged in before you submit your tutorials. If you wish to remain as a guest, proceed directly to the submission page.

Step 2:

You can find the tutorial submission main page at http://www.pixel2life.com/submit/ with the following form you need to fill out with the tutorial''s information:

Step 3:

Please fill in all the form fields with the relevant details about your tutorial and remember that depending on what category you pick, you may be required to submit an avatar image with your tutorial.

If you are REQUIRED to submit an avatar, please note that the avatar MUST BE RELEVANT to the tutorial you are submitting. DO NOT submit a generic logo or symbol when an avatar is required, it must be relevant to the tutorial itself. A generic avatar is fine for categories that do not require an avatar.

You should also try and provide the best title possible with the characters allowed. The more keywords in your title contains, the more likelihood it will be found when a user searches the index. For example, "Drawing a realistic 3D Granny Smith Apple in Photoshop" will likely increase your chances of being found in a search versus something like "Drawing an Apple".

Once your form has been completely filled out, you can go ahead and click the "Add to Submission" button and your tutorial will be added to the submission list. From there you can add additional tutorials to the submission list (You can add as many tutorials as you like at the same time, even from multiple categories) or click the Finish button to begin processing your tutorials.

Step 4:

Once you confirm your submission, the site will validate your submissions and add them to the queue, or generate an error if there is a problem with your submission form, which you can fix and re-submit on the spot. If your submission is processed successfully, you will see the following confirmation screen:

Your submission is now complete! From here you can visit other areas of the site and remember to visit your source site to see how far along your tutorials are in the queue. You can easily find your source site at any time with the source site lookup tool located HERE.

My tutorial wasn''t accepted! Why?!

It is important to consider that every tutorial that is added to the index is verified by hand. It takes up to 7 days for your tutorials to be approved!

If your tutorials are getting refused, then here are some reasons you should verify:

1. Your tutorials are linked to a forum, and you must be registered to that forum to see the posted threads. Tutorials are instantly refused if we can''t view them without logging in to something.
2. Verify that your tutorial is complete without errors in the steps. We''ve seen tutorials on creating forms that were completely missing the instructions for creating the submit button.
3. Do we have too many duplicates already? Tutorials on creating scanlines in Photoshop, or using includes in PHP are submitted almost daily. You may want to check and make sure that your tutorial isn''t already in the index several times over.
4. Is your tutorial of decent quality? P2L is closely looking at quality in your tutorials. If you submit garbage, it goes in the garbage bin.
5. Dead images or images hosted in a bandwidth limiting free image host are automatically declined.
6. Do your tutorials have screenshots for the key steps? Any tutorial with 20 steps and a single final result image with nothing in between will probably be declined.
7. Did you submit a relevant avatar image if avatars were required? If you submitted the same avatar for several tutorials and they have nothing to do with the content of your tut, then it is automatically declined. This is only applicable to graphic oriented categories. If, for example, you have a PHP avatar you use for all of your tutorials, you can submit that same one. If you have 5 tutorials for Photoshop, the avatar must be relevant to what is in each tutorial.

When you submit a tutorial, be sure to include your email address in the submission (This is automatic if you are a member) and you will receive an automated email message when your tutorial is processed. If your tutorial is declined, the email will include the main reason why it was declined.

If you''re not sure on what is expected when building a tutorial, feel free to check out this P2L article on building quality tutorials HERE.

How do I know when my tutorial has been approved?

Tutorial submissions are reviewed on a daily basis and we strive to maintain a 2 - 5 day wait time for approvals. We offer a few methods that allow you to check on your tutorials to see where they stand in the queue and if they''ve been approved or declined.

Pending List:

You can view a live list of all the tutorials currently sitting in the approval queue for all the submissions in the database. This can be seen at http://www.pixel2life.com/pending/ The list is in order by date, with the latest submissions showing on the first page. To see which tutorials are closest to being reviewed, look at the last page of the list.

Source Site Page:

You can easily see how many tutorials you have live and how many are still in the approval queue by using the search source site tool at http://www.pixel2life.com/sourcesearch/

Click on the Pending Tutorials filter option and it will list any pending tutorials you have and where they are within the queue.

Email Notification:

When you submit a tutorial, be sure to include your email address in the submission (This is automatic if you are a member) and you will receive an automated email message when your tutorial is processed. If your tutorial is declined, the email will include the main reason why it was declined.

Tutorials not generally accepted

Due to multiple tutorials on the same or similar topic, here is a general list of tutorials we do not accept any longer:

Adobe Photoshop or Image Ready:

- Sigs (This includes grunge sigs, tech sig, and any other general sig guides)
- Blending (How to blend images into a background)
- Multi-colored backgrounds
- Grunge Backgrounds
- How to create Shine and Gloss
- Scanlines or patterns
- How to cut out an image from a background
- Text and/or Image reflections
- "Blended" text that is used in many grunge sigs
- Blast Effects
- Twirls, basic portals and other spinning effects
- Animated shine or glints
- Fading text
- Filter effects like turning a lens flare into a swirling background
- Turning a color photo into a black and white image or isolating colors in a photo
- Changing Eye Colors
- Turning a Photo into a sketch or drawing
- Drawing Tentacles
- Scan bars or faded bars
- Animated Rain
- 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.. pixel borders
- Tech style borders
- Dreamy or Angel photo effects
- Installing Brushes


Cinema 4D:

- Spikey Renders
- Generic Abstract Renders


HTML:

- iframes
- Basic guides to tables, images, hyperlinks etc...


PHP:

- Using includes
- Basic email forms
- How to generate user stats like referrer, IP, browser etc...
- Basic hit counters
- PHP Navigation like index.php?page=blah etc...
- Basic tutorials and "introductions" to PHP

SPECIAL NOTE FOR CODING:

We are no longer going to accept tutorials on PHP, ASP, HTML, javascript etc... that are simply code snippets and don''t explain what the code actually does. No one learns anything by just copy/pasting code snippets, so please explain what your code does so it''s actually a tutorial and not a free script.

This list is updated on a regular basis. Please remember we are looking for unique tutorials... not the same concepts repeated over and over again.

That''s it for submitting tutorials to Pixel2life.com! For those of you that do take the time to submit content to us, thank you very much and we hope the exposure you receive from the site helps with your continued improvement and success.