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Contributing to our Blog

Authors who are informed and passionate about technology and IT write technical blogs that range from high-level, conceptual overviews to deep dives with code snippets. They all offer insight into solving problems and getting the most out of applications and platforms. Many also add a personal perspective to the conversation. These authors share their journeys, trials, and triumphs.

First, thanks for your interest in contributing and helping us craft quality content for our official Technical Blog. Second, in order to make contributing a pleasant experience while maintaining a visual and consistent content standard, complete these steps before writing and submitting a blog entry for publishing.

For ideas of topics to blog about, check out the end of this file!

Preparing for your blog entry

  1. Fork this repo (https://github.com/rackerlabs/docs-developer-blog), then clone your fork.

  2. Before you start working, make sure your local content is up-to-date and merged with the right upstream branch:

       git remote add upstream [email protected]:rackerlabs/docs-developer-blog.git
   git checkout master
   git fetch upstream
   git checkout -b name-of-your-branch
   git merge upstream/master

  3. Create a file inside the _posts/ directory with the following naming convention: YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-your-post.md, where YYYY-MM-DD is the date you want you entry to be published. The published URL for your post becomes https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/title-of-your-post/ when published.

Formatting your post

The post should contain front-matter, an excerpt, and the actual content with optional images.

Front-matter

Add Jekyll front-matter (or metadata) to the top of the file you created in the previous step. for example:

---
layout: post
title: "Blog entry title"
date: YYYY-MM-DD 23:59
comments: true
author: Author(s) name(s)
published: true
authorIsRacker: true
#
# The *authorAvatar* and *bio* entires are optional, but include them if you can!
# The avatar must be a hosted image, such as a gravatar.
#
authorAvatar: 'https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/<insert hash for your headshot>'
bio: "<insert a sentence or two about yourself in first or third person>"
categories:
    - This Category
    - That Category
    - Other Category
#
# Use canonical entry if you are republishing a blog from another site, such as
# your personal blog.  Do  NOT republish without the autor's explicit permission.
#
canonical: https://original-url.link.com/post-name/
metaTitle:
metaDescription:
ogTitle:
ogDescription:
#
# The following properties are OPTIONAL and affect the text and image that
# appear by default in link previews when sharing blog posts.
#
ogImage:
twitterCreator: "@your_twitter_handle" # NOTE: The quotes are required!
twitterDescription:
twitterTitle:
---

NOTE: The "ogImage" must be a fully-qualified URL. If you'd like to use an image asset that is being uploaded as part of your blog post, the pattern for the final URL is as follows:

<rackspace CDN>/<image name>-<sha256 hash>.<image extension>

Where:

  • <rackspace CDN> is https://657cea1304d5d92ee105-33ee89321dddef28209b83f19f06774f.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com
  • <image name> is the case-sensitive name of the image not including the extension.
  • <sha256 hash> is the 64-character hex output from running the command sha256sum /path/to/image
  • <image extension> is jpg, png, etc.

Example:

  • https://657cea1304d5d92ee105-33ee89321dddef28209b83f19f06774f.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/default-og-image-46fb3587dedfdf950188fabbddd596d67e6b699374a7f4e36b43046d7a24fd09.jpg

If you'd like to use an image asset from your post that shouldn't appear in the post itself, you can include style="display: none" on the <img /> tag to hide it within the post while triggering the necessary plugin code to ensure it is made available on the CDN based on the preceding naming convention.

Make sure that the dates in the file name and front-matter match.

Available categories include the following:

  • Ansible
  • Architecture
  • Automation
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Chef
  • Cloud Files
  • Cloud Monitoring
  • Cloud-networks
  • Cloud Servers
  • Configuration Management
  • Database
  • Developers
  • DevOps
  • Docker
  • Events
  • General
  • Java
  • Jclouds
  • Jenkins
  • Mailgun
  • Neutron
  • NodeJS
  • OpenStack
  • Oracle
  • Orchestration
  • OSAD
  • Private Cloud
  • Python
  • Salesforce
  • SDK
  • Security
  • SQL Server

If no category fits, use General.

If you'd like to use a category that is not in the list, please send an email to [email protected]. To avoid being flooded with categories, which might apply to only one or two blogs, we have automated throttling. However, notify us so that we can discuss your ideas for a new category.

Excerpt

Include an excerpt marker after your first paragraph or so to separate the preview text that appears on the blog index page from the full article. To do so, use the following HTML comment:

The excerpt paragraph, which should give teh reader a taste of what's to come.

<!-- more -->

The rest of your article.

The marker comment <!-- more --> must be on its own line, starting at column 1, and separated from content on either side by a single blank line.

Images

To include images in your post, place them in the directory _assets/img/ within a new subdirectory that has the same name as the file containing your post. Within your post, use the following markup:

![Alt text here]({% asset_path YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-your-post/filename.png %})

To wrap text around an image on the right, use code similar to the following:

<img class="blog-post right" src="{% asset_path 2015-06-17-built-an-app-on-openstack-at-qcon-ny-2015/qcon.png %}"/>Last week I went to QCon NY 2015 to be both a student and a teacher in their tutorial track. They follow the standard pattern of having 2 days of tutorials prior to the conference proper. To understand QCon a bit better, here's their mission statement.
Writing your post

We recommend that you conform as much as possible to the Style Guide.

Submitting your blog entries

Follow these steps to submit your entry for publication.

  1. Submit a PR (pull request) against master branch.
  2. Do everything in the PR template checklist.
  3. Once the PR successfully builds, you can preview your entry by clicking on the preview link in the Git GUI. Sometimes, if you push a new commit to your PR, the changes don't show up in the new staging link. To force a rebuild, add a blank line to the bottom of your post and commit the change.
  4. When you're satisfied, the InfoDev team will do a quick editorial review of the content and suggest changes, if necessary.
  5. After the content is ready to go, the InfoDev team will publish the blog on the date that you selected.

Thanks again for your interest in contributing!

Ideas to post about

Updated from list of trending search terms in Rackspace sites on March 13, 2020:

  • actionable insights
  • apache kafka
  • binary tree
  • buffer
  • cloud gaming
  • cloud infrastructure
  • data structures
  • database performance
  • database security
  • dbase
  • design patterns
  • dgraph
  • elastic search
  • gig economy
  • google cloud next
  • image recognition
  • iterable
  • java ee
  • kibana
  • learn python
  • micron technology
  • mobile world congress
  • mongo db
  • mongodb management
  • multithreading
  • neo4j
  • numpy
  • postgres
  • redis
  • regular expressions
  • replica set
  • sharding
  • unstructured data