Articles that teach people about linux
Assignment
What editors want: They want articles that teach people about Linux, especially those about OpenChange, WebRTC, gaming servers or Ansible. Make sure your piece is original, detailed, accurate and formatted according to their style guide
https://www.linode.com/docs/linode-writers-formatting-guide/
Content Guidelines
Guides should instruct readers how to accomplish a task on, or relating to, a Linode or Linodes. When writing, think of both what the guide should accomplish and why the reader would want to use your guide. A guide should consist of about 90% instruction with 10% explanation.
Guides should be informational but friendly. Use the active voice whenever possible, and the pronouns you or we instead of I. Avoid unnecessary information. Brief, to-the-point explanations are preferred, but also consider the audience and the level of technical ability needed to complete each task. A beginner’s topic usually will require more detailed explanations than one for an advanced user.
To be considered, submissions must be written in English and adhere to the formatting described in our Writer’s Formatting Guide. The primary qualities we look for in a guide are:
• Accuracy: Instructions should be straightforward, technically correct and thoroughly tested. Include brief explanations of each step to explain the purpose of each action. Guides can use technical jargon pertinent to Linode, Linux, and related topics, but use common sense-if a term implies an advanced concept that fewer people would know, take a sentence or two to explain it, or link to a wiki or manual page.
• Completeness: A guide should leave readers with a finished, working configuration and give them an idea of where to go from there. Considerations for security and best practices must also be made, including firewall rules.
• Originality: Content should be original material written for Linode. We will not accept submissions which are duplicated from other sources, including personal blogs
General Tips to Consider
• Choose topics on relevant technology; guides on emerging tech that is not yet well-documented are preferred.
• Use other Linode guides as building blocks. For example, if your guide requires a system with a working LAMP stack, you can link to our LAMP guides instead of duplicating that information in your own writing.
• Link to your guide from your own website or social media posts. This actually improves the page rankings of your own site because of an SEO aspect called link authority.
• Avoid 3rd-party PPAs and repositories.
• Unless there is a major advantage, use distro repositories rather than compiling and installing from source code.
• We generally decline guides on tweaking or performance tuning. For a guide of this theme to be considered, it must first designate a use scenario. The changes must show a measurable, reliably reproducible improvement between a control group and an experiment group, both operating in the given scenario.
• Use proper capitalization for software. For example, nginx is the web server, NGINX Inc. is the company behind it, and Nginx would only be used to start a sentence, title or heading.
Reasons Your Guide May Be Rejected
As much as we would like to support all writers, we can not accept every guide we receive. Here are some negatives you can eliminate in your own work to ensure a strong submission:
• Not enough content, or lacking original content. For example, if the guide too closely resembles a current guide either by Linode or on another source.
• Guide is a duplicate of your own content from your personal blog, wiki submissions or forum posts.
• Topic is sufficiently documented in official wikis, manual pages, etc.
• Content and formatting guidelines were clearly not followed.
• We already have plenty of guides on the topic. Examples: LAMP & LEMP stacks, MySQL.
• Inappropriate topic for the Linode Communit
