[Evangelism Reps] Some tips on Tech Blogging
Monday, April 9th, 2012 at 12:05 pmAs a ramp-up measure for the Mozilla Evangelism Reps program I just finished a first draft of tips and tricks how to approach technical blogging in Mozilla.
Topics covered are:
- Basics of blogging – being a spokesperson
- Be professional (no racism, sexism, calling names)
- No political and religious views
- Have something to say
- Speling duz kount
- Doing research and finding gaps to fill
- Tone of voice
- Use active voice
- Use short sentences
- Skip the foreplay
- Give a full disclosure
- Answer the WIIFM - “what is in it for me”
- Stick to one thing and explain it well
- Give credit where credit is due
- Structuring your post
- Use proper headings
- Tell your story
- Use lists
- Give away everything at the beginning
- Add breathing space
- Extra value goes to the end
- Linking
- Link meaningful text
- Links are proof, not context
- Know your link targets
- Test your links
- Provide “read more” resources
- Images
- Link to the resource
- Use absolute image paths
- Have a sensible alternative text
- Crop what is not needed
- Play nice with people’s bandwidth
- Multimedia (Screencasts, Audio)
- Provide a fallback link
- Keep them snappy
- Cross-link from the video site
- Code examples
- Link the original source
- Embed readable code (colourcoding, Gists, interactive code examples with JSFiddle/JSBin/Tinker.io/Dabblet)
- Make your code work
- Write code for the web
- Cross-posting and promotion
- Do not publish the same blog post on different blogs
- Write targeted smaller posts linking to the main one
- Link all the resources back to the blog
- Find outlets to promote the post
A lot of this might appear basic to the casual observer, but I am constantly amazed just how many simple things are done wrong when posting technical content. So I hope this will help some people get started on solid footing.