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Blog writing for new authors
The purpose of this page is to guide new authors on blog writing process. Publishing a blog post (a to z) covers all of the technical aspects as well.
The purpose of our innovation design blog is to share our user-centered design and development process at the Office of Natural Resources Revenue. The strategic purpose of the blog is to:
- provide a venue for long-form publishing about our process, decision making, and workflow
- nurture and support the adoption of our process, or elements of our process, in other federal agencies
- create another outreach vehicle for Natural Resources Revenue Data (NRRD)
- introduce a tool for Information and Data Management team collaboration and sharing
- continue telling the story of the NRRD site, started on 18F's blog in 2014
- The entire Information and Data Management team is welcome to submit ideas for blog posts and author them, with support from other team members and final review by the product manager at the Office of Natural Resources Revenue.
Start your blog in a shared document in the shared folder so that you can collaboratively work with teammates. We currently use Microsoft Teams. Ask a teammate for access if you don’t already have it.
Step 2: Review the NRRD content guide.
This will help you with guidance on punctuation, capitalization, and vocabulary, among other things as you are writing.
Write in plain language that someone unfamiliar with our sites and subject matter would be able to understand. Make sure that you have a title and descriptive alternative text for all of your images. We use the alternative text to make sure that the blog is accessible to all readers.
Check the reading grade level of your blog using the Hemingway App. We are trying to write below the 10th grade reading level.
Write an excerpt to introduce your blog. Keep your excerpt short but informative. It should be no longer than a paragraph. The excerpt is displayed with the blog title and date on the homepage.
Ask a teammate to add you as a blog author and send them a profile picture cropped to a circle and sized to 104px by 104px. Ask for help as needed.
Ask teammates to review the post by posting the document in the Github issue or asking directly for feedback. Teammates may edit or comment in the document itself or send feedback directly to you. Once you have finalized the document, ask for help converting the document to markdown and going through the publishing process. If you are interested in learning the publishing process you can refer to the comprehensive guide, which will show you how to add the blog to the Github repo and take you through the pull request process. A teammate can guide you through this process if interested.
Once a teammate has added the blog to the Github repo and prepared the pull request, you will be able to preview the blog as it will appear on the website. Review this version to make sure that everything looks correct before asking a teammate and product manager to approve. Once approved, the product manager will merge the blog into our development site and it will be published during the next NRRD release. Congrats! You wrote a blog!