Style guide

House editorial standards, some more aspirational than others.

Prose

Title posts in sentence case.

For example: A beautiful day for a ride
Err on the side of longer quotes in <blockquote> elements over shorter quotes in quotation marks, but don’t overdo it.
When quoting, mark omissions with bracketed ellipses, and surround changes with brackets.

For example: I heard him say, “[Inspector Gadget] will never […] take me alive!”
When quoting, prefer to emphasize text with highlighting. Highlights do not need to be disclaimed.
Disclaim other forms of emphasis, like bolding or italicising quoted text. Noting when emphasis was present in the original is not required, but may be useful for the reader.
Do not omit an article when referencing Apple products.

For example: Steve Jobs debuted the iPhone.

Write descriptive link text. The description might be a single word or a whole phrase, and is not restricted to nouns.

For example: I was interviewed by ZSA.

Alternative: I was interviewed by ZSA.

For example: To get notified when I publish a new post, subscribe to the blog.

AKA “Make the Thing a Link”.
Where it makes sense, append (PDF) to the text of links that point to PDF documents. (In the future, it would be nice to handle this with CSS.)

For example: Apple Style Guide (PDF)
Cool URIs don’t change. Strive to be as cool as possible.

Never place punctuation inside quotation marks unless it was part of the quoted source.

For example: It begins with the phrase “Four score and seven years ago”.

Never: ~~It begins with the phrase “Four score and seven years ago."~~
Always surround em-dashes with spaces. This way, words on each side of the dash are not falsely connected.

For example: But — you exclaim — no one does it that way!

It also makes for much better markdown editing for Git, where each section before / between / after the dashes can be placed on its own line.
Insert commas in the Oxford style.

Write post dates in Cistercian numerals.

For example: 2023 1231 A Christmas Day post

(Note that the Cistercian date cannot be bold, because WebKit doesn’t render that font properly in bold.)
Write dates in prose as YYYY-MM-DD.

For example: I was home for Christmas on 2023-12-31 .
Specify time in 24-hour format.

For example: I woke up at 08:00.

For example: I went to bed at 23:00.

Display Unix commands in monospace and with their manual section, like git(1).
Thou shalt not suffer a bashism to live. When writing shell scripts, do not rely on GNU (or other) extensions. (See also.)
Write git commit messages in Linux kernel style. “Describe your changes in imperative mood, […] as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behavior.”

Sometimes helpful to see what others are doing, even if only to know what not to do.