EDIT: Added editing policies (heh. meta.)
Dates
In content that is designed to have a long lifespan, avoid temporal references such as “A few days ago” or “last year” as they will degrade and confuse
- This can be ignored in content with a short lifespan (e.g. statuses, notes) but is still a good idea
- See Also You Should Not Be Displaying Relative Dates by Aaron Parecki
Edits
Mark up all edits with ins and del tags, applying the datetime="" attr where useful, especially to dels (they usually have an accompanying ins, so no need for a datetime on that)
Summarise last edit at the top of the article, including the datetime attr
TODO: How best to present edit history?Hard coded at bottom of article?- As of I am storing update data in
insanddelelements within the article body, and update metadata as JSON in a separate field - I am displaying the edits in reverse-chronological order at the bottom of the article, with a unicode character to indicate the nature of the edit, Author h-card, relative time and edit summary
- Edit summaries inspired by Smallest Federated Wiki
Linking to others
Always try to link by full name to a personal homepage instead of a twitter account/etc. Examples:
- In March 2012, [Full Name](Personal Domain) wrote about [Some Topic](Blog URI)`etc…
- When they said [Something about some topic](Tweet URI), I think [Full Name](personal domain) was mistaken etc…
Replying to a post:
- Link both to the post and to the authors personal homepage, as the post may be elsewhere on the web but the author should still be credited properly
- If the author has written more than one post that is being replied to, list all the relevant ones, preferably with comments.
- Start the reply post with the reply link and an author domain link in a natural language intro paragraph.
Mentioning commercial services:
- Here it’s a big more vauge
- I tend to link if I want people to go and look at the site, and leave it plaintext if I don’t.
- So there’s implied positivity/negativity here.
Syndication
Syndicate to the maximum number of relevant networks. Adjust the content to suit the network
- Twitter
- Obviously content length restriction applies
- For blog posts, include the tweetable tagline. This should be independent enough for it to make sense if retreated
- For replies/related posts, @reply the original poster as per usual
- Facebook
- Text can and often should be a bit longer than a tweet
- Don’t include @twitternames
- Use the FB API to take control of link, image, description and the like