[IMAGES]

• Try to make sure that images are 400px wide if possible. Sometimes it’s not possible because the resolution is too small, but as a rule, the page looks more uniform if the images are as wide as the columns of text.
• Put a 1-px black border around all images except those with white negative space
• Do not center any images. This might sometimes look OK on the blog, but it looks weird in peope’s RSS readers and in the LJ feed.
• We can have up to 2 graphic items (pictures, videos) before a cut. There are circumstances when we can post more than that, like if they’re part of a series that’s more effective if immediately seen together, or if they’re so good that it’s impossible to choose.
• If you have a choice between opening your post with a picture or a video, choose the picture because they’re often more striking than an embedded YouTube video. YouTube videos often just have a random, grainy frame on display with a Play button over it, and that’s not as enticing as a clear graphic of the same subject. However, it’s still OK to make a post with just an embedded video if there’s no alternative.

[LINKING] Try to remember to make your links open in a New Window if you have time, so that users stay on the page if they click on a link. I will try to see if I can make this a default setting. If you have a lot of links, put them into bullet point format.

• Link 1
• Link 2
• Link 3
• Link 4

[QUOTING]

• If the quote is short enough that you can recite it in one breath, put it in quotation marks and use italics. List the author of the quote on the next line unless you’re quoting them a lot in the same post and it’s obvious who the quote belongs to:

“This is a new secret science, to master the emptiness and turn it into something that is filled with sound and visual images.”
– Karlheinz Stockhausen

• If you are quoting an author and their work, italicize the title of the work:

“We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters…”
– William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties

• If the quote is longer, forgo the quotation marks and italics and indent the paragraphs:

Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer of the southern railways, persists in the hotel at Androgue, amongst the effusive honeysuckles and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then. He was tall and listless and his tierd rectangular beard had once been red. I understand he was a widower, without children. Every few years he would go to England, to visit (I judge from some photographs he showed us) a sundial and a few oaks.

Hume noted for all time that Berkley’s arguments did not admit the slightest refutation, nor did they cause the slightest conviction. The dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlon. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist.

– Jorge Luis Borges, Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius

• If you have a post that begins with both a quote and a captioned image, it’s OK to put the caption below the post like in this post: Mix It, Mix It Good.

[CAPTIONS] Captions should go directly under a picture using a <br> break. The text should be small. There should be no space between the picture and the caption text. Example below:

These are some lovely ties by Cyberoptix.

[FORMATTING ISSUES] To avoid formatting code issues, make sure you don’t paste formatted text from another browser window or email directly into the “write post” page. De-format any text you paste from elsewhere by pasting it into a text-editing program (like TextEdit) first before pasting it into your post.