For new writers
Dear new writer,
Welcome to the club! I like to think that writing for Just an Asterisk is an open experience. You may write what you want, when you want, and there will be very little supervision of your posts. However, there are a few guidelines that I like to follow, mainly to provide a seamless look and feel to the site. This is a living document, maintained by the writers on this site, so please let me know if there are any omissions.
Subject Matter
The world of technology is vast and intimidating. Simply put – there is no reason to add to this confusion. Posts should revolve around topics that might stump family members and friends. Our goal should be to take a scenario where someone asked us a technology question and, if possible, turn the answer into a universal guide for the solving the problem. Although guides to advanced techniques, coding etc are cool – they don’t really have much of a place here. Tips, product reviews, sites of interest – these are the topics that I find get the best readership.
The only exception to this rule is for AutoHotKey scripts, which I maintain for the advanced users of the world. Submissions here should be a group effort and will require considerable testing. It’s not something that drives many readers to our blog (even if that was the original intention) but I was given a shoutout on Lifehacker.com three times for solutions I wrote. If writing autohotkey scripts are not your cup of tea, don’t fret. I don’t plan to spend much future effort on this part of the site.
Stylistic and Typography
- Most images should be 400px wide and placed inline. In most cases, this will not permit additional text to be left or right, as our column is really only 450px wide.  For some examples, see the advanced content section below.
- Small example images, such as you might expect from a 
yearbook photo surrounded by a bio, can be included. However, please alternate left and right float to make the text easier to read. The picture to the left of this text is “left float” and is 200px wide.
- The template for the site is based in CSS and future iterations will be the same. All typographic standards on the site should be respected in every post. This means that although you might like how courier new looks in your post, but it’s not really the standard. Remember, our goal is make things more simple for our readers – we don’t want to confuse them with unnecessary formatting.
- A bio may be included at the bottom of your posts. Please place this in Italics. If you would like an email address @justanasterisk.com, please let me know. All new users will be setup with publishing accounts and a new email address is easy to forward to your current email.
Content
- Content may not be negative about a product or company. I’ve tried to create this blog using the old adage “if you don’t have anything nice to say…” I’d like each writer to respect that guideline. We write positive reviews about products or we don’t write about them at all. Our negative feedback is a lack of feedback. This doesn’t mean you have to write beaming reviews of everything you find. In fact, I love to include sections describing possible improvements, as it demonstrates how thoroughly we’ve mastered the subject matter.
- Keep it clean. The odd #$#% joke is welcome, but if you’re using the real words, your work will be removed from the site and you will not be asked to write again.
- Respond to all your comments within a few days (no more than 2). Each comment should have some sort of reply, even if it’s just thanking the user for their opinion. Obviously, multiple users can be thanked in one reply (to avoid responding 30 times) and inane garbage can be either ignored, removed as spam or simply thanked and forgotten. You can always head to the admin page to check your posts.
Advanced Content
If you would like to embed video, javascript, html etc in your posts, please be very careful that the content is safe. The last thing we need is a user downloading a virus from our site. A good rule of thumb is if the domain is not known to everyone (youtube, google, or even break.com) then it is not appropriate for posting. If in doubt, please email me.
As an example, to post a YouTube video or any other video, we have a standard procedure. The image below shows a YouTube page with the video identifier highlighted in yellow.
To embed this video directly into your post, simply put the following text in your post ["youtube tgbNymZ7vqY"] – without the quotes. This is the result:
. You can also see the full list of services available from the menu by clicking the little television button shown below.
You can also embed almost anything into your post using HTML. If this is not something you are comfortable performing on your own, it’s probably not necessary to your writing, but I’d be happy to help.
Thanks for reading through our guidelines. That covers the basics, but feel free to ping me with questions at ab@justanasterisk.com. I’m happy give further thoughts.
I look forward to reading your posts!
~ab