This guide is intended for existing members of WWC who may wish to edit this website for the following reasons:

1. to post a notice to the noticeboard
2. to submit their contribution to Anthologies
3. to update their author bio and website
4. to help fix typos or make minor improvements on this website
5. to add a banner announcing something

An FAQ section follows that may be of help should you run into trouble.

This website is maintained manually and may require a bit of technical effort to contribute to or update. Our community organisers are more than happy to help get any information you may need onto this website, especially with posting notices. Please email either James G. or V.H. Belvadi with your idea or request and we will get back to you.

Prerequisites

A basic knowledge of git, or at least navigating around Github, is expected. If you do not believe you can continue with this, please feel free to send your contributions, or editing requests via email. While we cannot promise to update the website right away, we will try our best to do so as quickly as possible. However, please continue to read this guide as it will tell you what sort of document you need to send our way.

We use Hugo to run this website and therefore all contributions should be in markdown with yaml frontmatter. While some knowledge of Hugo can help if you run into trouble, you do not need to know Hugo to make contributions. You do, however, need to know Hugo (and Tailwind) to propose structural or functional updates to this website.

1. Posting a notice

Posting a notice is a three-step process: create the notice, type up the front matter (and contents) and finally push or submit the notice.

1.1. Creating a notice

If you are familiar with Hugo please clone this website’s repo, install Hugo and any dependencies if you have not done so already, and create a new notice by running the following command from the terminal:

hugo new noticeboard/your-notice-here --kind notice

This should give you an index.md file inside content/noticeboard/your-notice-here with the approproate front matter.

1.2. Front matter

In the front matter for a notice, the following fields are compulsory:

• title
• summary
• authors is an array that should look like ["Jane Doe","Betelguese","John Smith"] (see the Updating your author page below for more)
• date should take the format yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss±hh:mm (the last ±hh:mm is your timezone but leave it as +00:00 if in doubt)
• type should be notice
• draft should be set to false (when you are ready to publish)

The file you created using Hugo, or downloaded above if you went that route, will have other front matter fields like cover and subtitle which are self-explanatory (or see FAQs below for more).

To pin your notice set the pin field to true (the default is false). A pinned notice will always appear before other notices with a subtly different design intended to draw attention to it. Multiple notices may be pinned but we recommend not pinning more than 3 at a time. If you pin your notice, please either remember to unpin the notice on a later date or let us know via e-mail how long you would like it pinned. Pinned notices may be unpinned at the descretion of our community organisers.

An especially important, but optional, field is external_link which is useful if you wish to send people to your or another relevant website as part of your notice, e.g. for a subscription form or for examples of an ongoing project.

Type the main content of your notice after the --- at the end of the front matter. There is no word limit.

1.3. Publishing your notice

If you used Git and Hugo, simply submit a pull request to publish your notice. Frequent contributors may request to be added to the repo to bypass this step (we are a community after all).

If you downloaded the file above, simply e-mail the file to James G or V.H. Belvadi and we will publish it for you. However, we cannot promise to publish it within tight deadlines.

2. Contributing to Anthologies

The general steps for contributing to Anthologies is identical to posting a notice, but with a few important variations. While the steps are all detailed below, feel free to also consult the Posting a notice section above for additional guidance. Submitting an article is a three-step process: create the article, type up the front matter (and contents) and finally push or submit the article.

Articles will be published once an entire issue of Anthologies is ready. This is why we will be using the word ‘submit’ rather than ‘publish’ for articles going foward.

2.1. Creating an article

If you are familiar with Hugo please clone this website’s repo, install Hugo and any dependencies if you have not done so already, and create a new article template by running the following command from the terminal:

hugo new anthologies/1/my-new-article --kind article

Make sure you change not only the article slug my-new-article but also the issue number /1/ to correspond to the next issue (to which you are submitting). Check the Anthologies page to figure out what the upcoming issue number will be.

This command should give you an index.md file inside content/anthologies/1/your-notice-here (or whatever issue number you picked) with the approproate front matter.

2.2. Front matter

In the front matter for an article, the following fields are compulsory:

• title
• subtitle
• authors is an array that should look like ["Jane Doe","Betelguese","John Smith"] (see the Updating your author page below for more)
• syndication_link should be a link to a webpage on your own website (if this article was originally published there)
• date should take the format yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss±hh:mm (the last ±hh:mm is your timezone but leave it as +00:00 if in doubt)
• type should be article
• draft should be remain true

The file you created using Hugo, or downloaded above if you went that route, will have other front matter fields like cover and tags (see FAQs below for more).

Type the main content of your article after the --- at the end of the front matter. There is no word limit.

2.3. Submitting your article

If you used Git and Hugo, simply submit a pull request to submit your article.

If you downloaded the file above, simply e-mail the file to James G or V.H. Belvadi and we will line it up for publication.

All articles submitted will be published together as part of an upcoming issue of Anthologies. Articles will not be published independently or immediately upon submission. To help with this, please ensure your draft status is set to true.

3. Updating your author page

Everyone who has made at least one contribution to WWC – whether that is an article in Anthologies or a notice posted on our noticeboard – will have an author page that is created automatically. It is therefore extremely important that you—

• ensure that the first time you save your author name in the authors field in the front matter (see above) your name is saved as you would like it to be saved
• ensure you use the author slug as Hugo (and therefore this website) programmatically generates it to be (using a slug of your choice can break the link)

Here are examples of author pages. All of this section is optional. When you publish something on WWC you will already have an author page. This sections exists simply to give you the opportunity to customise your author page with a few lines of bio and, more importantly, to help someone who stumbles upon your articles or notices on WWC to also find their way to your personal website.

Before starting, visit your author page and note down the URL. Note particularly, the hyphens and full stops. If your name is J.R.R. Tolkien and you put in, say, authors: ["Emily Brontë","J.R.R. Tolkien"] in your notice or article, you will find that your author page URL ends with ../authors/j.r.r.-tolkien/ including the full stops and not simply ../authors/jrr-tolkien/ or some other variant. However, you can make it look like the latter by following the steps in §3.3 below.

Noting the initial/automatically generated URL is important for two reasons: firstly, this means your title in your author page must also be J.R.R. Tolkien and not a variation; and secondly, any change to the title of your author page, authors in your notices and articles, or the authors subfolder name will break your author page links. If you change one of these, you will have to change them all. If multiple variations exist across multiple notices or articles, WWC will have no chocie but to treat you as multiple authors.

It’s OK if all this sounds complex right now. Keep reading below and you should have this set up in no time.

3.1. Create your author page

If you are familiar with Hugo please clone this website’s repo, install Hugo and any dependencies if you have not done so already, and create your author page by running the following command from the terminal:

hugo new authors/firstname-lastname --kind author

This should give you an _index.md file inside content/authors/firstname-lastname with the approproate front matter.

3.2. Front matter

In the front matter for your author page, the following fields exist:

• title (despite what it looks like, this is your name and not your title – trust us – and should be exactly as it appears inside notices etc.)
• name (this is a short form of your name used e.g. to link to your website and possibly elsewhere in future; should you decide to leave it empty, we will use your title instead)
• bio is… your bio, without HTML or markdown support – just plain text
• website is a full link to your site, e.g. https://indieweb.org

Strictly speaking, the bio, name and website fields are optional. (Although, surely, you would want to link back to your website!) While your author page will function without doing anything in this section, once you do create this page, your author page will be associated with it permanently. That means leaving the title field blank will also show a blank name on the WWC website, so please fill it in.

There are two especially important fields for author pages:

• url is where your author page will be accessible
• aliases which allows multiple links to your author page

The url field is unique in that it will be pre-populated with /authors/<your-name>/ and you will need to replace <your-name> with whatever slug you want. If your name has special spacing, characters or full stops, e.g. J.R.R. Tolkien, you may wish to set the slug as /authors/jrr-tolkien without which your author page will be located at /authors/j.r.r.-tolkien instead.

When you set the url note that your old author page will no longer be accessible, i.e. at /authors/j.r.r.-tolkien. If you want it to be accessible on both URLs, say if you have previously been sharing the automatic URL, set the old URL as an alias. Although you can use this field to set a completely arbitrary URL as well, we request that you please do not do so.

If you do not wish to set a custom url (you may, for example, be happy with the default) then please delete the entire field from the front matter rather than leaving it blank. Likewise delete the entire aliases field as well.

Do not type anything else in this file. Typing in what is traditionally the ‘content’ area below the last --- will do nothing. Please see the FAQ for troubleshooting author pages.

3.3. Publishing your author page

If you used Git and Hugo, simply submit a pull request to publish your author page. Frequent contributors may request to be added to the repo to bypass this step (we are a community after all).

If you downloaded the file above, simply e-mail the file to James G or V.H. Belvadi and we will publish it for you. However, we cannot promise to publish it within tight deadlines.

4. Fixing typos and making minor changes

Unfortunately, you will need to be familiar with git for this. Please make your changes to this website’s repo and submit a pull request.

However, we appreciate that you might spot an error or wish to suggest improvements and either might not know Git or might not want to spend time making the fixes or improvements yourself. In such cases, please do not hesitate to write to us directly.

5. Adding a banner

We realise there may be times when it is worth really drawing people’s attention to something, much more than posting to the noticeboard or pinning a notice might do. For such times, we have a banner available for you to hoise at the very top of the WWC website. Use this power responsibly.

To add a banner you will need to be familiar with Git and Hugo and make your changes to this website’s repo. If you are not familiar with Git, please get in touch with us and we will sort things out for you.

You will need to edit just one file located in /content/banner/index.md which has the following front matter:

---
headless: true
title: ""
callout: ""
button_text: ""
button_url: ""
draft: true
---

The file also has instructions within it, but they are described here again for your convenience. The only compulsory field is the title. If you want to direct visitors to a link, provide the button_url and, ideally, also the button_text failing which the button will generically say ‘Learn more’. Leave headless to true and set draft to false when you are ready to hoist the banner publicly.

Please keep everything short, including the title, callout and button text. For inspiration to cut your word count, think of the last time you came across an unweildy banner on a mobile phone.

FAQs

I don’t know markdown

That’s OK! You can convert rich text to markdown in many ways. If you would like to learn markdown (and we certainly recommend it) there are plenty of wonderful websites on which to get started. If you use an Apple device, for example, you can type rich text in your Notes app (as of OS 27) and copy as markdown. Android and Windows devices offer similar features, or you can use a web-based docx convertor. All said and done, we think it is simpler, quicker, easier and handier to just learn markdown.

How do I add images?

Simply place the image file next to your index.md file inside your-notice folder and refer to it by name and extension. Please do not place image files anywhere else, especially inside the static folder.

webwriterscollective.com
└── content
    └── noticeboard
        └── your-notice
            ├── index.md
            └── cover.webp

Using images as cover is the same; specify the image in the frontmatter against the cover field.

I got the issue number wrong…

If you typed the issue number wrong while creating a new article within Hugo, we have fallbacks in place to ensure your article does not get lost. It will, however, be misplaced because it has been filed under the wrong issue. Just let us know and we will fix it for you.

How do I pin a notice?

As discussed in §1.2 above, set pin to true in the front matter of your notice’s index.md file. Please remember that pinned notices may be unpinned at the descretion of our community organisers.

My author page has a problem

If your author page is (a) not showing up or (b) missing articles and/or notices, please check the following. First, ensure that your name across all your submissions is identical. Second, ensure that that name matches exactly what you have specified as the title in the front matter of your author page. Third, check that your folder inside /content/authors/ is named correctly (including fullstops etc.) Fourth, check if you have specified a url field in the front matter and done so correctly.

For example, if your name is J.R.R. Tolkien, your folder would be /content/authors/j.r.r.-tolkien and your author page will be accessible at ../authors/j.r.r.-tolkien as well as at ../authors/jrr-tolkien so you long as you set url: "/authors/jrr-tolkien" in your front matter.

What is the tags field?

You might notice the tags field in the front matter of notices and articles, but no tags anywhere on this website. We do not currently use tags in order to prevent cluttering up this website, but we like to keep writings tagged for when we think of a more creative but unclutterred use in the future. The tags field works like the authors field, i.e. as an array (see above for more on the authors field). We do not prescribe how you should tag something, but we request that you tag sensibly so as not to end up with multiple competing variations of the same tag across the site, e.g. travel, travelling, traveling, travels.

I have a question not answered here (or an idea)

Please get in touch and we will help you (or appreciate your idea).