These are the house editorial standards.
Some are more aspirational than others.
Prose
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Posts should be titled in sentence case.
For example: A beautiful day for a ride
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Err on the side of longer quotes in
<blockquote>
elements over shorter quotes in quotation marks, but don’t overdo it. -
When quoting, any omissions must be marked with bracketed elipses, and any changes must be surrounded with brackets.
For example: I heard him say, “[Inspector Gadget] will never […] take me alive!”
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When quoting, prefer to emphasize text with highlighting. Highlights do not need to be disclaimed.
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Other forms of emphasis, like bolding or italicising quoted text, should be disclaimed. Noting when emphasis was present in the original is not required, but may be useful for the reader.
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Do not omit an article when referencing Apple products.
For example: Steve Jobs debuted the iPhone.
Links
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Link text should be descriptive. 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”.
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Links to PDFs should usually end with
(PDF)
. (In the future, it would be nice to handle this with CSS.)For example: Apple Style Guide (PDF)
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Cool URIs don’t change. Strive to be as cool as possible.
Punctuation
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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." -
An em-dash should always be surrounded by 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.
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Commas should be inserted in the Oxford style.
Dates
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Post dates should be written in Cistercian numerals.
For example: A Christmas Day post
(Note that the Cistercian date cannot be bold, because WebKit doesn’t render that font propertly in bold.)
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Dates in prose should be written as YYYY-MM-DD.
For example: I was home for Christmas on 2023-12-31 .
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Time should always be specified in 24-hour format.
For example: I woke up at 08:00.
For example: I went to bed at 23:00.
Code
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Unix commands should be displayed 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.)
References
Sometimes helpful to see what others are doing, even if only to know what not to do.
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Inspiration thanks to rubernerd.