Contributing to Josh's Linux Guide

Created on July 9, 1998
Last updated August 24, 2000
Development stage: Alpha

If you feel that you would like to contribute to this Linux guide, I encourage it, since I can't handle everything. More advanced topics are also welcome, since people who are new to Linux eventually move on. I'd like to keep the audience reading as long as possible. Below are just some guidelines on how to contribute to this guide.

  1. You must be willing to maintain your document, and this means that you must provide an e-mail address to contact you with. You must also be willing to receive any sort of feedback from readers, and even help them with any problems they encounter.
  2. Have a short title on your pages, but let them be descriptive enough to let the reader know what the page is about. I've made this mistake plenty of times. Put your title in the <TITLE> and <H2> tags.
  3. Don't use abbreviated Internet English. Use proper spelling and grammar as far as you can help it. There will be typos, but eliminate them to the best of your ability.
  4. Have fields for when the page was created ("Created on"), when it was last updated ("Last updated"), and its development stage ("Development stage" can be alpha, beta, or complete). You can see examples of this in many of my documents.
  5. Though it's not necessary, I highly recommend allowing people to copy, print, and re-distribute your documents. I also let people modify my documents, but they have to give credit to me. I'm no legal expert so I don't know much of the quirks involved in putting up documentation online. You may also put your work under the OpenContent license if you want. I am also considering switching to OpenContent. Put your copyright notice at the bottom.
  6. If it's not too inconvenient, have the page hosted on your own web space so that you can easily make updates to it. If that's not possible, then just e-mail me the updates, to joshuago at users dot sourceforge dot net. Even if you have the page hosted on your own server, it's also a good idea to e-mail me the updates in case something happens or whatnot. It will be copied into a subdirectory called submissions/.
  7. Filenames depend on what type of audience it was aimed for. If it begins with "linux-" then it should aim to be applicable to any and all distributions of Linux. If it begins with "redhat-" then it should be limited to the Red Hat distribution. It's better to write documents aimed at all distributions. I only have the "redhat-" pages there so people can install it, since the way distributions are installed varies greatly.
  8. Put program names in bold (<B>), commands in bold fixed width, (<B><TT>), directory and file locations in fixed width (<TT>), and printouts preformatted (<PRE>). Remember to close the HTML tags. These are just basic guidelines to follow; you can also use italic for emphasis.
  9. Titles are <H2>. Subsections should be in <H3> and sub-subsections should be <H4>. You should never have to use <H5>.
  10. Links to any outside sites must have a target of "_top" in order to ensure that they aren't loaded in the frames. I emphasize this strongly so that your readers don't get annoyed at you.
  11. If there's anything you're still unsure of, look at the HTML source on any of my documents. If you still aren't sure, then send me an e-mail.
  12. Subscribe yourself to the linuxguide-authors mailing list on SourceForge.

Following these guidelines will help tremendously in keeping things consistent. Any future changes that are required, I'll let you know, or I'll make the change myself.


Copyright © 1997-2000 Joshua Go (joshuago at users dot sourceforge dot net). All rights reserved. Permission to use, distribute, and copy this document is hereby granted. You may modify this document as long as credit to me is given.