Blogging Your Open Source Projects
This page highlights how the SDRT helps you promote your project using blogs.
Power’s BT department hosts a tech blog. We invite all members of BT to publish technical content to this blog.
Step 1: Consider the Reader
Before you start writing anything, answer these questions:
- Who is the audience for this post?
- What makes your project interesting to others?
- What can we say about this code in production?
- How should readers get started using your code?
- What do you want this code to do in the future?
Step 2: Tell a Good Story
A good blog post tells people we did something we think they should notice.
- A good blog post is clear about the audience it’s addressing. If someone in your intended audience sees the post, they know if they should read it. If someone is not your intended audience, they know to skip it.
- The post starts with the main announcement: That we published something new and want to tell you about it. Don’t bury the announcement in a long story explaining how you got to the solution. Start with the news. You can then develop the story in the body of the blog post.
- You don’t need to include everything a reader needs to know about your project. Write an invitation to learn more. The goal of the blog post is to get people to visit the project and try it out and hopefully tell others about it, not to be the project documentation.
- Blogs are more than words. Include an architecture or dependency diagram. Add a graph showing how things improve when people use your project.
Step 3: Get to the Point
Blot posts should be 750-1000 words. If you need more than 1000 words, consider creating a blog series with a few related posts.
Step 4: Review
Before we publish your blog post, you have to get approval from the SDRT.
Share your blog draft with the SDRT and we’ll review and hopefully publish the blog post and promote it internally and externally.
Step 5: Attribution Considerations
Much like open source code, we give proper attribution to content. Our blog posts contain text and images we create and own or licensed to use for this purpose (e.g. permissive Creative Commons licensed images).
Much like open source communities, we take special care to make sure that we treat people’s personal images and information in accordance with their personal wishes. If your post contains a picture of an event, we need to get permission from everyone in the photo before posting it. If you are naming people in the post, we need their consent. When seeking consent, ask if they want their name linked to their LinkedIn profile or Twitter handle.