What can you do to make sure your roundup looks and feels right? You start with an introduction that opens with a rhetorical question or an agenda-setting statement that summarizes some of the most important topics in this week’s writing. This must be the very first sentence, so that it is captured by the site’s theme as an excerpt for display on the front page. Alternatively, if you’re more familiar with WordPress, you can use a custom excerpt to give yourself more flexibility.
You can name the h2 headings anything you want
Give a brief description of what’s going on in this section. One or two sentences will do. This is an opportunity to explain why this topic is important right now, but a bland description is fine.
- Links are styled using span class=”content” | Example site (and so are notes on content and accessibility)
Joe Bloggs is attributed as the author of the post about Game Title in Italics, and a summary of their argument follows.
- Links within bullet points automatically take up an entire line | Example site
Senior Curator Zoyander Street did this so that every bullet point can act like a tidy little box, with the gradient orange highlight emphasizing the link more than the description.
- Try to have 2-5 links per section | Example site
Awesome Writer did a particularly great job this week, so their piece comes last and has a blockquote.
Blockquotes shouldn’t be too long, usually 4 lines in the back-end editor is a good maximum. I wonder how many characters that is? Let me keep on writing in here until I hit four lines and then I can tell you. A blockquote should either demonstrate an article’s main argument or highlight a particularly notable moment that might be away from the main thrust of the piece. Okay this is about 400 characters.
Most h2 headings have an id tag
This is a bit technical, so if you’re not familiar with HTML don’t worry about it
More post metadata
If the roundup doesn’t use images to quote from a visual essay, then the featured image should be one of the standard black-and-white abstract featured images (some of them kind of look like a bird on a cliff). You can find these by searching “featured” in the menu that comes up when you click “set featured image”.
- Author name
Should be set to the curator or guest curator’s name. - Category
Should be This Week in Videogame Blogging - Post title
Should be today’s date. Yes, this is redundant and bad for SEO, and we might change it in future.
Plugs
Reminders of stuff we’ve done in the past week on Critical Distance, such as podcast episodes or Blogs of the Roundtable things, as well as any links that promote the contributor’s work, all go below a hline and under an h2 heading that makes clear that they are promotional.
- Format them as usual
Descriptions are optional though.
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