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WIP: Writing a Great Rust Blog Post
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content/technical/2018/08/anatomy-of-a-great-rust-blog-post.md
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content/technical/2018/08/anatomy-of-a-great-rust-blog-post.md
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To date I've posted 718 posts to [Read Rust]. I can't profess to having read
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every single one but I have skimmed them all and have definitely extracted
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the information required to post them to the site. Some blogs make this
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easier than others. In this post I cover some things you can do to make your
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blog and the posts upon it easier for readers and myself alike.
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I'll cover four areas:
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1. Tell a Story
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1. Sign Your Work
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1. Make It Easy to Read Future Posts
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1. Provide Meta Data
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## Tell a Story
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A story has a beginning, middle, and end. Blog posts can benefit from this
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structure too. The beginning sets the scene, and provides a shared starting
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point for the main content of your post. When a post just dives straight into
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the details, without context it can be hard to work out what the topic is,
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what background there is, or what the motivations behind the work are.
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Once you've set the scene in your introduction you can dive into the
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details knowing your readers are on the same page. This is where the
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bulk of your post is written.
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At the end of your post wrap up with a conclusion. This may include a
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summary, details of future work, or unsolved problems.
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## Sign Your Work
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Writing a post takes time and effort. You can be proud of that and sign your
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work! Be it with your real name, a pseudonym, or handle. When posting to
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ReadRust it's important to me to attribute the article to the original author.
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I'm aware that some people prefer not to use their real names online and that's
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totally ok. When there is no name, a pseudonym, or handle on a blog it is hard
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to work out how to credit the author.
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## Make It Easy to Read Future Posts
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So you've written an interesting post that readers have enjoyed, often
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they will be interested in reading future posts that you write. You can
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make this easy.
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When
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looking for posts for Read Rust it would be impractical for me to
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manually visit the websites of every interesting blog to see if there
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are new posts. That's where [RSS] comes in. RSS lets my subscribe to
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your blog in my feed reader of choice and then it will check for new
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posts on the sites I follow, allowing me to read them all in one place.
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Pretty much all blogging software supports RSS. If you aren't already
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generating a feed I highly recommended adding one.
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If you already have an RSS on your blog ensure it's easily discoverable by
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including a link to it on your blog, perhaps in the header, footer, sidebar, or
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about page. Additionally include a `<link>` tag on the `<head>` of you HTML to
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make the feed automatically discoverable.
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## Provide Meta Data
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There are actually two audiences for your content: humans and machines.
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The humans are the readers, the machines are computers such as search
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engine indexers, Web Archives, the Read Rust tools! Ideally your content
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should be easy for both to read.
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The [add-url tool in the Read Rust codebase][add-url] looks for a number
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of pieces of metadata in order to fill in the details that are included
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in the entry for every post:
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* **Title** in a `<title>` tag.
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* **Author Name** in a `<meta name="author"` tag.
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* **Author URL** in a `<link rel="author"` tag.
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* **Date Published** in a `<time>` tag, typically nested within an `<article>` tag.
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* **Post Summary** (excerpt) in a `<meta name="description"` tag.
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The tool looks for these in the post itself, as well as in the RSS
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feed if found. Often it still turns up empty. You can help your
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content be more machine readable by including this meta data in your
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HTML. The example below shows all of these properties in use.
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```language-html
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<meta charset="utf-8" />
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<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0" />
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<title>Post Title</title>
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<meta name="description" content="The design and operation of the little Rust content aggregator I built.">
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<meta name="author" content="Wesley Moore">
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<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.wezm.net/feed/" type="application/atom+xml" title="WezM.net - All Articles" />
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<link rel="author" href="http://www.wezm.net/" />
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</head>
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<body>
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<!-- header, nav, etc. -->
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<main>
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<article>
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<h1>Post Title</h1>
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<time datetime="2018-06-03T07:34">03 June 2018</time>
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<!-- post content -->
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</article>
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</main>
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<!-- footer, etc. -->
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</body>
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</html>
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```
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[add-url]: https://github.com/wezm/read-rust/blob/d41672caaa269fc7f4584e5db2154bd9b3bd3c92/src/bin/add-url.rs
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[Read Rust]: https://readrust.net/
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@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
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---
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title: Writing a Great Rust Blog Post
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extra: Some tips for writing a blog post that is readable by humans and machines alike.
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kind: article
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section: technical
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created_at: 2018-08-18 16:17:00.000000000 +10:00
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keywords:
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- rust
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short_url:
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