The W3C Blog is an opportunity for the W3C Team and collaborators to interact with the Web community. This blog is operated by Ian Jacobs, managed by Coralie Mercier. It is not supported by the W3C systems team. We set up these guidelines to make people independent, read all of them before sending any questions.
Blogs are systems to manage automatically a certain number of pages. They offer an editing user interface and automate the creation of archives, indexes, feeds, etc. The W3C Blog uses Movable Type Open Source Engine. We have chosen this engine because it allows us to keep the full blog into the dated space of W3C under CVS.
If you have any comment on the W3C Blog, or suggestions for this FAQ, please send an email to w3t-comm@w3.org.
You need an account to have access to the editor user interface of the W3C Blog. To get this account, send an email to w3t-comm@w3.org with the following information.
Depending on our trip schedule and our location in the world, it might take a few days.
We created a URI shortcut to create a new blog post, keep it as a bookmark. You will access a window with a form.
New blog entries are micro-blogged automatically to identi.ca and replicated to twitter. Read more on the micro-blogging manual [team-only].
When you create a new entry, there is a box with the label Excerpt. In this box, you can create one simple paragraph. The goal is to be a teasing for the rest of the article that will appear on the first page of the blog.
It can be written in HTML but only with inline elements, things that would usually go inside a paragraph element (p). If you are not sure, use an external editor, create a paragraph, type text and copy only the markup in between <p> and </p>
If you really don't know what to put in the excerpt, you can also just let Movable Type automatically fill it with the first few words of your entry, but it is generally better to come up with an efficient teaser.
You have choices between many syntaxes for writing your blog post. For more details about choosing the right syntax for your own needs, you can read the Movable Type documentation on text formatting. The default after your account is created is [None]: This format allows you to compose your post in pure HTML; the system will not modify your text in any way when your entry is published.
When you have written your blog post, there are two buttons Save and Preview.
Once you are finished (or at intermediate stage), push the save button. It will keep a copy, so you can continue to think about it and finish editing later on. There is a pop-down list with the label Status. Your article will be public as soon as you select "Publish" and Save.
That said, there might be a delay of 2 to 5 minutes between the time you have pushed Save and the article really appears on the W3C blog. Also, note that you might get an error after you saved. Don't trust it! We haven't found a way to avoid this error to be displayed. Just ignore it, your entry should be saved.
All comments on the W3C Blog are moderated. It means that they are queued until you approve them manually. The policy of the W3C Blog in a spirit of openness with regards to Web communities try to stay open as much as possible with regards to the comments. We reject all comments without a given name and email address. We usually reject comments with an aggressive tone or off-topic.
Some comments may appear valid but contain (a) link(s). The motivation behind may be to promote a webiste. The advice is to either remove the link(s) when possible, or edit out the "http://www." part.
We catch a lot of spam automatically, really a lot. Still, a few of them goes through and are waiting in the moderation queue. When you access the blog, give us a hand by deleting them. Be careful to not delete valid comments.
You can assign categories to blog posts. It will help to publish them in specific destination. This W3C Blog is shared by a few communities. We used specific categories for specific communities.
Do not use these category, except if you really know what you are doing. If your technology is not represented, draft (eventually publish) your blog post and send us an email to w3t-comm with a request and explanation for adding a new category.
You can assign tags to your blog post. Tags are short keywords, you can use any of them without worries. Try to reuse tags already used in previous posts. When you start typing, a drop down list of suggestions will appear. Separate each of your tags with commas.
Example: A blog post about html and
internationalization could carry the following tags html,
i18n
Sometimes you might need to have the content of a specific category of the W3C Blog on a page elsewhere on W3C Web site. We can customize a template for it. Refrain to do so, though. The more templates we have to manage, the more complex the system becomes. An example of usage of template is the HTML home page. The articles displayed there are coming from the W3C Blog posted with the category HTML, as well for the TAG.