Devrel/Hacks

Mozilla Hacks is a pragmatic blog for designers, developers, deciders and people who make the web. We cover Firefox development, and the varied engineering work that tests, releases, supports and secures the browser. Hacks also publish pragmatic explanations of emerging standards and new APIs, reports on tooling for website and web platform development, as well as news from the MDN Web Docs team, where we document the web, and past events and activities of the Developer Relations team.

Mozilla Hacks is managed by the Community team and Melissa Thermidor is Managing Editor.

We also manage the Mozilla HacksYouTube Channel as well as the Mozilla Developer and MDN Web Docs Twitter accounts. Please contact Melissa Thermidor if you need content shared from these social media accounts.

Everyone has a voice and we would like you to use our platform to connect with developers. We are seeking technical content, opinions, and stories from many different viewpoints.

If your work touches the work of developers, but you're not sure what to write about, let's chat directly about telling your story. Happy to meet in our new reality of Zoom ‘real-time’ or address questions async on Slack, or email. Sometimes a conversation can clarify a storyline, or shed light on how to most effectively share your new learning or key idea.

Engineers have asked, "I'm a software developer. I'm not a writer. Can you help?"

Yes, we can. We are happy to meet people where they are, and work 1:1 with you, your topic, and your idea.

Writers' Guidelines

Workflow and review process for Hacks posts

• If you have a timely and pragmatic original post on a technical topic of interest (Firefox, Mozilla, JavaScript, CSS, web design and development, the web platform and advanced development), we'd love to hear from you. Please complete a request form and send it to Melissa Thermidor by email with a brief description of your article.

Please share your first draft in a Google Doc, and help us identify key stakeholders/approvers/review who will need to review and share feedback. Once all comments are in the Gdoc and have been resolved, the post author is responsible for adding the draft directly to WordPress. Don't worry about copyediting, SEO, etc - the managing editor will make these changes. We'll establish a publication date, share with all relevant social channels, and prior to publication we do a final copyedit and link check in the WordPress post.

• We typically publish 1-2 times weekly on Tues - Thur, 8am PT. We avoid scheduling more than one article on any given day.

• When you write for Hacks, you are welcome to cross-post to another blog or Medium channel/account, but we ask that you DO NOT publish until we have published on Hacks.

House Style

• We respect sentence case (EU style) and Title Case (US style) titles. British and Canadian authors are welcome to use British English spelling. (We are a global, geo-distributed organization, right?)

• Please do not use emoji in titles, they break on some platforms. Also, please do not use H1 headers. Use H2 for section headers, H3 for sub-headers. Please do NOT include links in headers. They will be removed.

Code syntax for Hacks posts

• We're now using the wp-highlight.js plugin for code syntax highlighting/display.
• It autodetects a wide variety of programming languages
• Format: <pre><code class="js">keep on rocking the free web foo</code></pre>

Images, captions, and video

• Author bio image: You can connect a gravatar.com image with the email address listed in WordPress to display an author photo or image alongside your bio.
• Images in a post: Upload via "Add media" link in Wordpress. WP will host your image. Use the upload link to embed video also. Please don't host images externally.
• IMPORTANT A11y requirement: Don't forget to include a description of the image in the alt= field provided, for screenreaders. A post is not complete until alt text is available for every image.

• For video, here's a format that works: [embed]YOUR VIDEO EMBED URL[/embed]

Links: We like links!

• We like them best in the body of the article, rather than served as relative links with a separate Reference or Footnotes section at the bottom
• Please use the target="_blank" argument in your URL call. In the WP-editor you can "Open link in a new window/tab" when you use the "Insert/edit link" UI.
• Look for places to link to relevant technical content from Mozilla Developer Network (e.g. articles about new features, functions, or APIs) or Wikipedia (esp for technical acronyms). Don't assume your readers know where to look.

• Length: Most Hacks articles fall in the range of 800-1500 words. Some run longer, but if they run much longer we'll encourage you to write a series rather than a single post.

Markdown

• We have a plugin that automagically converts Markdown to HTML. You should be able to write in MD and save draft.

Editorial Calendar

We maintain a Hacks Editorial calendar on Mozilla's GCal - if you are Mozilla staff you can access it here: Mozilla Hacks Editorial calendar If you are an NDA'ed Mozillian who needs access, you may request it by sending a message to Melissa Thermidor.