Guidelines for entries in the blog
Where the blog entry is a copy of a separate article, such as a news article, these are really the guidelines for those separate articles. (Experience shows that rigid rules are not appropriate).
Submission guidelines
Maintenance of the blog should ideally be just a publishing task, not a sub-editing task and certainly not an authoring or ghost-writing task. The need for text editing or Photoshop work before publication should be minimised by submitting material "ready to go".
Text
The basic principle is: "write directly for the target audience". Write what the audience is to read without the need for editing. This includes a suitable title. Use other blog entries and/or Focus as examples.
Ensure that members' names are spelt correctly. Mis-spellings are common, and sometimes require re-publication after correction.
Images
If necessary, submitted images will be resized to be suitable. But ideally they should be submitted at the right size to avoid re-sizing. Such re-sizing takes time and degrades quality. Where possible, supply both the thumbnail and the full size image.
Other information
It is useful to supply additional information, such as relevant URLs of external websites or of related pages on the NCPS website. If you have already found them, avoid the need for someone else to re-find them. Use other blog entries as examples of what may be useful.
Subsetting
Sometimes blog entries are better as subsets of the full material that has been published on the website, rather than a copy of the full article. (See below). Ideally, the author should identify such cases, and provide an indication of how the full material should be subsetted in the blog.
Publishing guidelines
Categories
Where useful, entries will be archived in more than one category. (This means that links will appear in more than one category archive). A typical example is a report of an interclub competition held elsewhere, where one article acts both as a "Meeting and event report" and an "Interclub competition result". It also sometimes applies in other cases.
Subsetting
Sometimes it is appropriate to subset a blog news entry and refer the viewer to the separate page for the full news article. The decision depends both on size (long articles are more likely to be subsetted than medium articles) and interest (minority interest articles are more likely to be subsetted than majority interest articles).
Schedule
For the sake of viewers, the guidelines are:
- Urgent entries will be published as soon as possible. This takes precedence over the following guidelines.
- At most one entry will be published in the blog each day, unless this contradicts one of the following guidelines.
- At most two "Awards & acceptances" entries will be published in the blog each week. (A week runs from Sunday to Saturday inclusive).
- Articles will not be delayed more than a couple of weeks, even if they are neither important nor urgent.
- Choice of entry to be published on a particular day will achieve variety for people viewing the blog once, twice, or three times a week, where possible.