TOTI Formatting Style Guide for Contributors

The style of TOTI is simply a guide to the Interwebs. I try to find something new and fascinating that not a lot of people have seen before. Pretend you are curating a museum on the giant world wide interblags. With this in mind, nearly every post starts with, "X is a video/article/page on Y," with a link at the title and first line. Other elements of a successful post include:

1) An interesting picture, or screenshot of the site, or something related to the subject matter. Upload these to the site rather than use the URL option, because otherwise they tend to go dead and disappear. Plus people get mad about us stealing their bandwidth.

2) A credit line in small font ("From" with a link to where you found the link).

3) Some description tags like "art" or "medicine."

4) Time stamp. Generally I will schedule a post to auto-publish at 12:01 AM. If I fell behind, I will backdate by posting a link as having been posted on the missed day at "11:59PM." I try not to let this happen too much.

5) I always try to conserve the original title of the link, from wherever I found it. For example, if it's an article, keep the name, keep youtube video titles exact, etc. etc. There is no reason for this. I've just been doing it for years.

6) Videos are very tricky because the maximum width of the blog's column is 400 pixels, so every time I have to do some math to make sure they proportionally fit. Otherwise when the post goes live they get cut off! Basically, if a youtube video has "object width="560" height="340"" I divide 400/560 and multiply that by 340 to get what the new height should be. In this case 243, and the new width is always 400. It's okay to round if you get a remainder. Youtube videos require me to edit this in TWO places, and I always wonder if there is a better way to this... Let me know.

7) Have fun! And thanks for participating in this labor of love.