Austin Bloggers News and Announcements

Charter Guidelines

• Postings to the metablog are pointers to blog articles, made by the author of the blog article.
• Post only your blog entries that are about Austin, or in which Austin plays a significant role. This includes: places, people, events, culture, politics.
• Do not post to the metablog just because you are an Austin-area blogger. We invite you to register your blog and add it to our list, but please limit your metablog postings to just your articles that are about Austin.
• Do not post articles of state or national interest unless they have some substantial relation to Austin. For instance, postings on the gubernatorial race are off-charter, but a post about a candidate appearance in Austin is ok.

Content Guidelines

• Do not post the entire contents of your site to the metablog--even if every article you blog falls within our charter. In this case, just pick a few of your best articles and post them here. If people like what they see they will follow through to your blog and bookmark or subscribe to your site.
• If your blog is a focused, single-topic site, please limit yourself to three metablog postings a week.
• Please do not use the metablog as a vechicle to flog your product or service (or band or whatever enterprise you have). If you've got something to say that would be of widespread interest to Austinites, then by all means post it. Otherwise, go buy an ad somewhere.
• Please keep things as PG-13 as possible. We're all (mostly) adults here, and we don't care what you write on your own site, but please try to avoid gratuitous profanity in your metablog postings.
• Do not post articles that are ad hominem or personal attacks. A post that calls the mayor names is not acceptable. A post that critiques his policies is fair game.
• Please avoid redundant postings. Don't post a pointer to something that somebody else has already posted unless yours adds something substantive.

Style Guidelines

• Please DO NOT SHOUT. Or use excessive punctuation!!!! Please use proper mixed case. Write like you are composing a newspaper headline and lede paragraph.
• The metablog only accepts plain text. You can try to enter HTML, but the markup and tags are going to be displayed in the text.
• The metablog is published in the UTF-8 character set. What that means in English is that "smart quotes" and other Microsoft non-standard text inventions won't display correctly. Be very careful if you cut-n-paste text rendered by a Microsoft product.