Evangelism Reps Training Program/TechBloggingAtMozilla
Tech Blogging at Mozilla Tips
The following are some tips and tricks to allow us to get the best out of our blogging efforts. Not all of these will apply to you and not all of these apply to all the blogging we do, but for a technical audience we found them to be very effective.
Very, very basic things
When you start blogging for Mozilla, you become a spokesperson for us. As a spokesperson you will reach a lot more readers than you would on your personal blog (in most cases) and you have the benefit of the Mozilla community doing word-of-mouth propaganda for you.
With that in mind there are a few things to keep in mind, that are very simple.
- Be professional - no calling names, no racism, no sexism.
- Keep your political and religious views out of this - this is tech blogging.
- Have something to say - there is no point in repeating the technical info on the wiki when you don't add to it. Find the story around the technology, and blog about this. There will be a session on this at the speaker training.
Tone of voice
On Mozilla's tech blogs we are what Mozilla should be - the voice of reason in a mad tech world that has been taken over by marketing people years ago. We don't have shareholders pushing agendas down our throats, we have no quota to fill when it comes to blogging.
Our publications should come out of interest, show what is in the pipeline and give people the information they need to get going - without prejudice towards other browsers and with a practical implementation as the goal. This does not mean we can't speak about Firefox only things - far from it, we should do that. It means though that we flag that fact up and test if browsers can do the things we publish as examples. More on that in the "code examples" section.
Technical blogs are all about the information - not about sugar-coating it. We target experts and implementers, so we should not bore them with marketing talk. This can come later when we cross-link the posts from press releases or marketing blogs. With that in mind here are some tips on how to do that:
- Use active voice - "Using the new full-screen API you can make any element in the document use up the whole screen - here's how to do that" is much more engaging than "The fullscreen API of the HTML5 specification allows developers to make any element take over the whole screen". The latter is interesting, the former gets the reader going.
So here are some tips
Links
HTML
The first thing to forget about is WYSIWYG editing in blogs - they all break and you will find that there is not enough to properly mark up what you want to mark up. We don't use the in-built CSS of Wordpress so most of the generated classes of the editor doesn't make any sense to add in.
Multimedia
Code examples