Some suggestions and guidelines for guest posts at NEQNET

Dear friend,

First of all, let me thank you for kindly accepting my invitation to write a post for NEQNET.

To help you with your writing (as well as to help me with getting your post ready for publishing on NEQNET ) I have put together some suggestions for you. Please do not think of them as a kind of hard rules.

If you want to take a look at some examples of guest posts at NEQNET, here is a short (and very much incomplete) list of them:

• Cosmology of F-theory GUTs by Jonathan Heckman (Harvard)
• Competing bounds on the present day time variation of the fundamental constants by Thomas Dent (Heidelberg)
• What is AdS/QCD? by Joshua Erlich (William and Mary Coll.)
• Multifractality and metal-insulator transition by Matt Foster (Rutgers)
• Return of the phoenix universe by Jean-Luc Lehners (Princeton)

General things

Content and readability

Posts work best on NEQNET if they are relevant to the main topic – physics and mathematics, there is a lot of room to move here – QFT, string theory, chaos, condensed matter etc. etc. Readers of NEQNET will also be very happy to see how mathematical methods work in, say, finances or sociology, etc.

I do care about “technical” quality of the post – the readers of NEQNET are PhD students, postdocs, professors, educated people who understand well what they are talking about, so they will easily (sometimes) pick mistakes and misprints if you have them. On the other hand, you do want to teach them something, so even if your post contains a lot of technicalities, please, make it readable.

Voice and Style

I do not care much about voice or style for you to write in. Maybe… what if you make your post a bit more playful/less formal than the paper? But let the voice and style be entirely up to you – as they say, guest blogger is the king

Open Problems

What I (as well as other people from NEQNET community of writers, readers, science lovers) am ultimately interested in is of course open problems, things, questions which remained unsolved or not completely understood by you, after your paper got published or submitted to archives. That is why NEQNET was started in the first place – to address open problems in physics.

NEQNET community is rather large at this point – 100 professionals in condensed matter, astrophysics, high energy and mathematical physics – we probably can try to help you finding answer to this open question. So, may I suggest that you list some of those open problems you are currently thinking about in the post?

If you don’t want to, don’t list any – it is you and only you who will ultimately decide the content of your post.

Recommended reading

There are also many students or people who are not professional physicists among the readers of NEQNET (for example, more than 600 people read NEQNET through Twitter and only few of them are physicists). They surely will be interested in your post (they typically are, as the constantly growing number of pageviews shows), but many of them will also want to get deeper into details of physics you discuss. What if in the end of the post you’ll list some 2-3 books or nice comprehensive papers on the subject which will help them to advance in understanding physics behind your post?

Length

My own technical posts typically have the length about 1000-1500 words. Lots of posts are shorter than that, and just several of them are longer (the longest one, I think, was about 3000 words or so).

Editorial

I will most probably do a bit of editorial work for your post to appear on NEQNET. Please, don’t take it personally – I’m just trying to make the content of this blog as good as possible. Also, if I want to change anything in the content of your post, I will most definitely consult you.

Originality of the content of your post

I assume that the post you are writing is exclusively for the use of NEQNET. In other words, my hope is that posts appearing on NEQNET do not appear in the same form elsewhere.

Byline. Highlighting you as an author

I am going to include a few sentences in the very beginning of the post to highlight you as an author of the post – in order for you to get as much credit for the post as possible (including improved Google ranking in searches featuring your name). If you are a blogger, we would like to highlight this fact and your blog as well. Please feel free do add links to your blog (may I suggest – no more than 3 links per post? Otherwise, it is going to affect my SEO.) I am not going to put nofollow tags on your links.

Technical details

How to start writing

With WordPress, CMS writing is really easy as you will find. Here is how to start this creative process technically:

• Login through http://www.nonequilibrium.net/wp-login.php with your login and password. You now see the Dashboard of the WordPress CMS
• On the left hand side of the page you can find several blocks of links, the one you need is called “Posts”
• Click on the link “Add new” from that block and the form for your post will appear
• If you are unfamiliar with HTML, there is a possibility to write the post using WYSWYG editor (on the right top of the text form for the text of the post you will see links “HTML” and “Visual”). Click on “Visual” if you prefer not to deal with HTML tags when writing your post
• When you are done, click the blue button “Publish” on the right

That’s it!

TeX

This blog is smart enough to understand TeX (basically, any kind of TeX: LaTeX, AMSTeX etc. etc.); to write a formula please wrap it by the tags [ tex ] and [ /tex ] (and don’t forget to remove spaces ).It basically works like this:

[ tex ]{cal L}=frac{1}{2}(partialphi)^2 [ /tex ]

produces

etc. Please note that NEQNET does not understand labels and references.

If the formula is too long, you will see an error message – then, it is meaningful to split your formula into two.

Images

It is also great to include images in posts – the posts with them typically get more attention (30-50% as I have found studying daily statistics of pageviews). Here are a few suggestions for images:

• the maximum width is supposed to be about 500 pixels (that’s the width of my content area – if you want something longer, the part of the picture will be cut by the CMS)
• please ensure that images are able to be used in terms of copyright

Images can be inserted by pointing to a link on your account or Flickr.

Gravatars

Gravatar is an image (usually, your photo, but can be anything else) that appears near your comments at NEQNET. It is actually nice to get one from gravatar.com, since those images will follow you from one blog to another (currently, almost all platforms – WordPress, blogger, etc. – support gravatars) as your signature.

If you don’t have a gravatar, NEQNET will automatically generate an ornament picture to be identified with your comments and contributions

PLEASE, DON’T THANK ME IN THE BEGINNING OF YOUR POST!

The reason is that I don’t feel quite comfortable with that – what are you really thanking me for? We both are just working for the community, that’s all. It is me who should thank you for your contribution.

Happy writing at NEQNET!

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions.

Dmitry.