Posting Tips

These tips should make life a little easier when posting to the news blog. Be sure to also review the CEHD News blog best practices guide.

Blog Article Titles

  1. Titles should be concise but descriptive. This is to ensure that title-only-feeds contain enough information for readers to choose if they are interested in reading the entire news item. (see examples below)
  2. First letter of title is capitalized
  3. Titles use last names only (i.e.)
    Dengel publishes in Nature or Wiese-Bjornstal will serve on science board of national organization or (no name) Outreach with second graders shows research in motion

Primary Category/Categories

The category should be set to the appropriate value or values. The primary category will most often be the originating department of the news item. Categories affect which RSS feeds pick up the article and will ultimately decide where an article appears.

See also News Categories Guide.

Article Content

  1. Article content uses faculty full name and title (see example below)
  2. Faculty names should link to faculty pages at UMN. Links are optional if faculty is at other institution – see Marion Hambrick in the Eric Brownlee article below.
    • Austin Calhoun, Ph.D. student and Tucker Center research assistant, and Nicole LaVoi, Ph.D., associate director of the Tucker Center, will present a poster at the Sport, Sexuality, and Culture Conference to be held March 18-20, 2009 in Ithaca, New York. Their research is titled “Examining Online Intercollegiate Head Coaches’ Biographies: Reproducing or Challenging Heteronormativity and Heterosexism?”
    • Thomas Stoffregen, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology, spoke to 80 2nd grade students at Brimhall Elementary School in Roseville about his research on “Body Balance at Sea.” Stoffregen’s presentation fit into their curriculum; the 2nd grade is doing a science unit on “Balance and Motion.”
  3. Links are contextual (i.e.)
  4. “Extend entry” should contain the rest of the story; everything after the first paragraph. Doing this will ensure that you can have a good short preview for the reader, to decide if they want to read more.
  • When citing titles of works, use University of Minnesota Style (not APA or other style)
    1. In general, capitalize principal words, retain original spellings, and add or change punctuation if necessary for clarity.
    2. Italicize (underline in typewriting or handwriting) titles and subtitles of:
      1. Published books, monographs, pamphlets, brochures, periodicals (magazines, newsletters, journals, etc.)
      2. Newspapers (entire titles), newspaper sections published separately
      3. Proceedings of conferences
      4. Collections of poems, plays, essays, short stories
      5. Long poems published separately
      6. Plays, motion pictures
      7. Operas, long musical compositions and their descriptive or traditional titles
      8. Albums or CDs
      9. Works of art
      10. Legal cases (except the v.) and shortened second references to cases
    3. Use quotation marks around titles of:
      1. Articles in periodicals and newspapers
      2. Parts and chapters of books
      3. Short stories and essays included in books
      4. Short poems
      5. Dissertations, theses, manuscripts, reports, unpublished lectures, speeches, and papers
      6. Radio and television programs (a useful way to handle titles of individual programs with a television series is “Yard ’n’ Garden: The Larch”)
      7. Songs, short musical compositions
      8. Substantive titles of conferences
      9. Official titles of art exhibits
    4. Do not italicize or use quotation marks around:
      1. University course titles; capitalize initial letters of major words
      2. Titles of sections of books (preface, index); capitalize a cross-reference, but do not capitalize a passing reference
      3. Titles of book series and editions; do not capitalize generic terms (series, edition) when they are not parts of titles
      4. Parts of poems, plays; do not capitalize them
      5. Names of depositories, archives, manuscript collections
      6. Names of musical compositions composed of music form, number, key
      7. Traditional or descriptive names of art works
      8. Descriptive titles of art exhibits and conferences
      9. Titles of regular newspaper columns
      10. Specific wording of short signs, notices, mottoes, inscriptions
  • When mentioning that a faculty member was quoted or referenced in a newspaper article, use the following:

Special Characters Require Special Attention

Caution! The title and body fields on blog posts do an adequate job of catching special characters, but they don’t catch everything and the additional fields do not catch special characters at all. A special character can break a feed to your site so double check!

  1. An ampersand, for example, needs to be represented with its character entity, & see the chart below as a guide. These characters have special meaning to computers and can cause problems with your blog or RSS feed. The WYSIWYG editor has a symbol button with a handy chart, and if you are winging it without the editor the following resources might help.
  2. Chart
    Symbol & – — ⁄ © ®
    Entity & – — ⁄ © ®
  3. More special characters may be viewed at:
    1. Web Monkey – Special Characters
    2. Degraeve.com – Special Characters in HTML