Guest Posts and Co-authored Posts

Since the beginning of 2017 I accept guest posts for the blog. For the why and what, see my new year’s post. If you consider to write a guest post yourself, please keep reading.

Update: I’d love to write co-authored posts together with you! Do you have some interesting topic, feature or trick you’d like to write about but don’t know how? Maybe you are not sure about the tiny language details and need someone to help you out a bit? Let’s talk!

No professional guest posts, please!

I regularly get email requests from professional guest post writers who promise clicks, money, engagement, interesting and relevant content in exchange for an opportunity to write a guest post. If you are one of those authors, I am sorry, I’m not looking for that kind of guest post. If you are a developer though and want to write about something relevant to this blog and not about how tech disrupts the industry or how to use C pointers, please read on.

Thanks…

…for considering to write a guest post or co-author a post with me on this blog! Here are some tips and hints for you, since even if you are familiar with WordPress, there might be differences due to plugins etc. If you have any questions that are not answered here, please let me know.

Your account

After our first contact, I will send you login credentials to your contributor account (You might also want to check your spam folder). You can use them to log in here. There’s also a link on the start page, further down in the sidebar. While you’re there, please write a few sentences about you in the “biographical info”, for example like Jonathan Boccara.

The post

The topic of the blog post should fit well into the blog, i.e. it should be about something that enables us to write cleaner (C++) code, better tests etc. It should, however, not be about a specific commercial product. Please understand that this is not the right place for marketing for companies or commercial individuals. The length of my posts usually is roughly between 600 and 1200 words. Yours should not be much shorter. If it becomes much longer, we should discuss if we can split it into two parts or if the scope can be reduced.

If you are unsure about whether your topic is a good fit or only have a vague idea, let’s talk, please don’t be shy 😉 If you need help, that’s perfectly OK, we can write the post together if you like.

Structure

You are free to structure your post as you see fit. The first heading should be an h1 heading, but it does not need to be before the first paragraph of your post. Be aware, that the table of contents for your post will be generated according to your headings. I will add a short paragraph as an introduction where I’d like to include a short bio of you, so please leave me two or three sentences describing what you do and where people can find you online.

Formatting

I use a MarkDown plugin for formatting. See this MarkDown cheatsheet if you are not familiar with MarkDown. You can also use a few HTML tags, like <h1>, <h2> etc. for headers, <a> for links and <strong> and <em> for bold and italic text, respectively. Keep your paragraphs and sentences short for better readability. If you want to draft your post offline, please paste it as MarkDown or plain text, not as preformatted HTML, like you get it from e.g. MS Word. Such HTML contains lots of unnecessary styles that mess with the blog style and needs some tedious editing.

I don’t have a code formatting plugin like Crayon, because it does not cope well with the MarkDown plugin, so you will have to write code snippets in plain MarkDown. Simply indent the code by 4 spaces, or add a line with the usual triple backticks before and after your code.

Images

To be independent of other websites, I like to upload images that will appear in the posts to my website itself. Currently, the contributor accounts I create for guest posts do not have the permission to add media files like images. For that reason, if you want to include images into your post, please send them to me via email and add markers for them in the post. I will then upload the images and edit the markers accordingly. Please make sure that the images have licenses that permit their use in the blog – copyright violations can be quite expensive.

Review

When you are done, I will proofread and review your post. I might give you some hints where I think a different wording might be better, and I will fix the spelling and formatting when I find errors. It will help both of us if you use a spell checker, though, and I also find tools like Grammarly quite useful for non-native speakers like myself.

In the review phase, I will also add that introductory paragraph. After that, I will ask you to approve my changes one last time.

Schedule

The post will be part of the regular blog schedule, which currently means it will be published on a Wednesday, 3 pm UTC. I will usually schedule the post to be published in the next two weeks after the review and your approval. On rare occasions, I might already have scheduled posts on those dates that I can not reschedule. In those cases, the post will be scheduled as quickly after those fixed posts as possible.

And now, welcome aboard and happy blogging!