One weird trick to improve your article and more stuff

First of all, thanks to all of you who took the time to write an article for Zig NEWS. Let me very quickly point out a couple of things that can help you:

1. Upload a title image

If you look at all my posts (excluding this one), I always put a header image that repeats the title or that mentions some key words.

I do it because of how the article looks like on social media. Without that image, all you get is a lousy default picture that won't be great even once I personalize it.

DEV.to has a system that generates title images automatically but apparently they didn't open source it and I haven't yet gotten around to forking Forem to customize it.

For this reason I'd like to invite people interested in adding a final layer of polish to their posts to add a header image manually.

To make it easier for you, this is how I do it: I have a Google Slide presentation where I put all my titles and then do File > Download > PNG Image (current slide) when I want to get a rendered image to add to my articles (Using the "Add cover image" button at the top of the editing section). It's as simple as that.

Here's a link to a template that you can copy in your own Google account. Feel free to use it verbatim, or to personalize it to any degree (or do something completely different, of course).

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1beRhu4d4J3bpU--TFdtanYFKVZj3fkyQ-JzVaLmRKeo/edit?usp=sharing

This setup gives you an easy way to create simple images for your posts and it also conveniently exports 16:9 images at 1080p resolution which seem to be the sweetspot between quality and data usage.

Finally, note that this seems to be a necessary step to have your post get featured at the top of the main feed.

2. Tags

Don't worry too much about tags, as an admin I can add them later for you so if you're unsure whether a tag fits your post or not, just leave it out and I'll add it later if necessary. Here's a quick explanation of the ones I've created:

• #tutorial: a guide on how to do one specific thing
• #learn: explanation of a topic that goes deeper than a #tutorial would into the reasons why things are the way they are.
• #beginners: aimed at beginners, usually makes sense to combine it with other tags

Note that #learn and #tutorial are also featured on the right sidebar on the front page.

Finally, feel free to create new tags as you see fit. The only tag to avoid is #zig because we reserve it for official Zig updates, as it would be meaningless otherwise, everything in here is about Zig.

3. Topics

I've started by writing educational content but Zig NEWS shouldn't be only dedicated to that. If you're working on a cool project, consider writing a nice post that showcases your work!