Author Guidelines

Want to become an author, or are you currently an author? Check out the content below to make sure you are either a good author, or you get approved to become one!

Author benefits

Why apply to increase your status?

• Free choice posting – post when you choose, not when a higher user determines you post
• You become a higher status member of the community, giving you more control and helping you interact more with others
• You can advance your writing skills for use elsewhere in the blogosphere and in your life generally
• You get promoted higher up the our writers page’s hierarchy of writers
• It can look pretty impressive to have on your record that you are an author for Technology Bloggers – a rapidly growing, friendly, dofollow, community blog
• Authors are given a link in the blog’s footer, which is visible to all logged in users (this appears under the ‘Community Links‘ heading)

For applicants

Make sure you have at least three published articles before you apply. You must have also read the post guidelines and the author guidelines in full, and adhere to them.

For authors

The same guidelines apply to you as all other writers. But authors must also make sure:

Scheduling

• They only post on (or schedule posts to launch on) days when there are no other posts – so check the admin consoles ‘Posts’ page, to see if there has already been a post that day, or if there is going to be one
• We don’t post on Sundays and we work to GMT, so please avoid scheduling your posts to launch on a Sunday

Images

• All articles must have at least one image of at least 75×75 pixels, it must be relevant to the post and not rude or offensive
• Images must have a title tag, and should have an ‘alt’ tag, captions are optional – if an image needs explaining, explain it! Use the ‘title’ to give a basic name to the image, e.g. iPhone 4S; then use the ‘alt’ tag to describe the image, e.g. A White Apple iPhone 4S; the caption can then be used to explain in more detail e.g. This is what Apple’s latest iPhone, the 4S looks like
• Title’s and alt’s should start with capital letters (unless it is a name like iPhone for example) and don’t need to end in a full stop, however if you wish you can use an exclamation mark or question mark
• Captions must end with either a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark

Links

• All text links should have a description – AKA fill in a relevant description in the ‘Title’ box underneath the URL box when adding a hyperlink in the ‘Visual’ WordPress writing/text box
• All external links (text and image) must open in a new window
• Excessive linking must not be used, however, do feel free to link to relevant resources – this is encouraged
• All links must start with http:// as if they do not, they will try to open internally – i.e. a link to apple.com would go to http://www.technologybloggers.org/apple.com

Titles

• Titles should be a minimum of around 10 characters, and a maximum of around 50 characters – make sure it fits on one line

Tags

• Try an enter at least 4 or 5 tags for each post, if a similar tag exists, use them (where appropriate) – too many tags can also be an issue, but anywhere between 5 and 20 tags are perfectly acceptable
• Don’t be too specific with tags – for example, a post which mentions the iPhone app Angry Birds should not have the tag “Angry Birds iPhone app” a more suitable tag selection would be “Angry Birds” “app” and “iPhone”
• If a similar tag exists, use it rather than creating a new one – i.e. if your post is about apps, then the tag “apps” would be appropriate, however if when you type the first few letters into the tag box, the word “app” appears but not the word “apps” then the tag “apps” probably doesn’t exist, “app” is very similar and should be used instead. That said, feel free to create new tags, so if neither “apps” or “app” existed, create one

Excerpts

• All posts must have an ‘excerpt’ which should be roughly a 5-30 word summary of the article (if you can’t see the excerpt box underneath the article writing area, click ‘Screen Options’ at the top and then tick the box that says ‘Excerpt’ – check out our how to show more screen options in WordPress article for more info)
• Excerpts must always end with either a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark – “.” or “?” or “!”

Categories

• In the WordPress admin console, ‘Post Types’ and ‘Topics’ are both grouped together in the ‘Categories’ box, if you are confused about what is a ‘Post Types’ and what is a ‘Topic’ check the sidebar
• Every post must be assigned to at least one ‘Topic’ but don’t be excessive – 5 is probably too many
• If a post is a review, how to, news etc. then it should be placed in a ‘Post Types’ category too, although if it is just a general article, it does not need to be in a ‘Post Types’ category – e.g. news on browsers should be placed in ‘News’ and ‘Browsers’ – again, check the sidebar for the different ‘Post Types’ that your article may be

Formatting

• For subheadings within a post, use Heading 3 tags, rather than bold text or Heading 2 text etc.
• Quotes should be put into blockquotes – this can be done by clicking the quotes (“) button, or by adding the HTML code <blockquote> before your quote and </blockquote> after your quote – also, don’t forget the quotation marks
• Do not use justification or any other alignment on your text, leave all text left aligned. As a blog we need to remain consistent, so please leave text to naturally align left – no need to click left align
• You may align/justify text differently if you are trying to gain a specific visual effect, however not when writing a normal post
• Authors must have good spelling, and must check their spelling and grammar manually and with a spell checker – reading an article before publishing always helps!

Anything you are unsure on, don’t guess at, email an administrator who will be happy to help

Finally, an important message:

If you abuse your author rights, they will be removed! Note however that good authors can be promoted to editors.

Click here to apply to become an author.