Guidelines for Writing Blog Posts
Here are some general guidelines for authors, if you’re not an author and are reading this, then feel free to go do something a bit more interesting.
These are guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Try not to go against them with every post, but if you feel the need to do so occasionally then that’s fine.
General Things
This blog post is about in-house development. The engineering work that is done behind the scenes, to enable us to do the science we do. The focus is on the word development.
Don’t write blog posts saying we did some fieldwork. Don’t write blog posts saying we bought some new kit.
Do write blog posts about new and novel methods you have developed to use off the shelf equipment. Do write blog posts about new calibration methods you have developed. Do write blog posts about things you are building or modifying. Do write blog posts about code that you are writing.
Keep it current. Write about a focussed thing you did recently.
A post should take about an hour to write. Your first couple may take longer, but once you get into the swing of it, it should be quick. If you are taking an hour and a half that’s too long, consider breaking it down into multiple (but still self-contained) posts.
To make it that quick you need to limit the length. About 4-6 good paragraphs or 1 page on a word document is about right.
Include 1 or 2 pictures. Again don’t stress about these and take ages on them. A photo of your kit from a phone or a screen grab of a plot from google sheets is totally fine. A photo of a hand drawn diagram is much better than trying to do something fancy and digital.
Don’t keep going back to posts and tweaking your posts, it’s okay to draw a line under it and call it done, even if it’s not perfect.
Write it in a word processor and use the spellchecker etc in that. It also means if you lose connection to the web page or something it’s not lost.
Technical
To create a blog post go to https://development.ncasdata.org/wp/wp-admin/index.php and hit posts on the left menu.
At the top of the page, by the “Posts” title is a button “Add Post”. Click that
Click where it says Add Title and type the title.
On the Right menu hit “Set featured Image” and pick/upload an image.
This image and title are shown on the Blog page, with a link to your post, but they are not included in the actual post. The title is also used to generate the URL for your post.
There will be a big bar with a + sign underneath the title. Click it to add your first block of content to your post. For most posts you only need to add one block of content and that is literally called a “content” block. If it is not shown in the 6 recently used blocks, then hit “Browse All” to find it.
You can now type or copy/paste into this content block. To add a picture use the “Add Media” button that is above and to the left of the block.
If the image appears small or pixelated then click it, hit the edit button and set the size to large.
You can add links by using the link icon at the top. If you want to link to another part of this web page, then start typing the page name and it will autocomplete.
You can link to all blog posts with one tag by linking to the page tag/<tagname>. <tagname> should be the name of the tag in lower case with no spaces. So to link to all meta posts link to the page https://development.ncasdata.org/tag/meta
Tags
Ensure you tag your post. On the right menu, under the Post tab, open the “Tags” dropdown. Enter the tags in the box there separated by commas or the enter button. Try to reuse tags as this allows us to link to clusters of blog posts with the same tag. When you start adding a tag, you will get an autocomplete dropdown of existing tags.
Always include a tag that is the name of the project.
If you are writing a post about coding, include the tag “coding” and the language you are using.
If you are writing about instrument development, include the tag “instrumentation”.
If it’s about the blog itself, include the tag “meta”.
If it’s about a weather/climate model, include a tag for that model.
A tag about the science area would be good, but I haven’t standardised these. Try to use one that already exists if you can. Create a new one if you need.
Formatting
It’s good if we have fairly consistent formatting. It just looks nicer
Remember how the title and featured image are not automatically included in your post. Add the title at the top and the image immediately below it.
As you might expect, use the Heading 1 style for the title, then Heading 2 for sub headings and Heading 3 for sub-sub headings, etc
If you want to do super or subscript it’s a bit annoying I’m afraid. Switch to html mode by hitting the “text” tab at the top of the block you are editing. Then surround the text with either <sup></sup> or <sub></sub>. for example cm<sup>2</sup> will give cm2.
If you want to include code then set the style to preformatted. This will give a fixed width font that looks like code.
Sign it off at the bottom with your name – I feel like there should be some auto way to do this, but I haven’t found it yet.
Phil Rosenberg
