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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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/.
- 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.
- 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.
- Titles are <H2>. Subsections should be in <H3> and
sub-subsections should be <H4>. You should never have to use
<H5>.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.