We encourage employees to actively keep blogs about their achievements, discoveries, interests, and ideas. The biggest concern with putting up an article is that once it's up there it's there for the world to see. Do you express yourself properly in blog posts?
This set of rules aims to help you efficiently write clear, effective blogging articles. In some cases, you might be interested in seeing our Rules to Better Technical Documentation for comments on how best to express your technical problems.
When blogging on a large topic, you have 2 options:
To help understand why option 2 is recommended, let's break it down into pros and cons.
A blog is still a website that you want people to visit, so it’s important to consider the User Interface (UI) and the User Experience (UX).
The RSS or 'subscribe' button is a place on your blog that alow visitors to easily receive your blog's updates.
If you find yourself developing a decision process to make a choice, that process should be documented as a standard. If want to explain further how you did something to solve a specific problem, you should record that in a blog post.
Any time you find yourself writing a long email, ask yourself whether it should be recorded in rule or a blog post, rather than just in an email. This way everyone who might find it useful can see it, not just the people on the email thread.
Every time someone does a talk/records a video, it helps spread the word about your content if your video keeps getting shared.
If you have a blog, a good idea is to add a simple post to tag your new video. It gets double Google juice if you:
Whether you are converting an email to a blog post or writing it from scratch, always invite and instruct discussion.
It is easy to think that "Content is King"; it is a well-known quote from an article by Bill Gates in 1996. But incorrect content is not very useful, so we think that " factual content is king".
In this age of misinformation, it is easy to get swept up in online hype and share stories/posts that everyone else seems to be sharing. This, however, can get us into trouble as it can perpetuate said misinformation and impact how a situation is viewed by the general populace.
It’s important to not only check that what you share on social media is correct, but also, that your opinions are based on fact.
If someone gives you feedback and you think it is worth incorporating into the content, you should always name them at the top of your blog post. This makes them feel good and gives your post more credibility.
Technical people need a little bit of a free leash in order to be creative. This will benefit the company they work for by demonstrating how technical your staff are, by driving more traffic to your site, and making your staff happier.
While blogging during work hours should generally be avoided, there are occasions when it becomes necessary, such as when you discover a valuable solution to a problem. To ensure that your blog posts reach their full potential, you should dedicate time after work hours for review and refinement - gold plating.
As long as there is nothing confidential or NDA in the content, any discussion point should be made public. Transparency is the name of the game. The more transparency you have between customers, management, and your technical employees the better. This fosters trust and a closer working relationship.
Probably the best reason to blog is when you have made a mistake, especially if you were pulled up for it by a peer. Post about the mistake you made, why you made it and how you are going to try and avoided it in the future.
When you update your blog post, use the word "UPDATED" clearly (in capitals and in red for example). The date should also be added, if relevant.
Most companies have intelligent people who make some relevant and useful points for the greater community or industry, while writing internal emails. Those emails should be published to the company blog for the following reasons:
The prefix is used to give context to your blog posts (or other type of content), so users know what to expect.
We all know the feeling after a long day... Exhausted, we wander the internet, lazily looking for content to consume easily. For many, this normally takes the form of watching videos after trailing through their Reddit, Twitter, & other social media platforms. Therefore, it is important to make sure that your blog post title and content stand out to this demographic.
The word emotional often carries a negative or unstable tone — it can imply being overwhelmed, irrational, or easily upset. In contrast, passionate conveys energy, dedication, and positive intensity.
Any regular blogger who writes about code knows that embedding code snippets into their posts can be a real pain!
Syntax highlighting, special tags and keeping a track of your code snippets can be a nightmare. As a developer, you're sold on the virtues of source control, making changes then rolling back, forking, and cloning code. Wouldn't it be great if there were a simple way to share a touch of code?
When you upload a video, the most important step is setting a good title and description. However there is a further step to take in order to help others find your video content.
One of the few disadvantages of videos over written content is that Google can't tell much about your video apart from the title and tags you may provide when you upload it. By having your video transcribed and adding the transcription text to wherever the video is shown, you're giving Google specific information about the content of your video.