Article Writing

Anele 'Mash' Mbanga asked a question in the Quick Questions & Answers forum:

I'm curios as to the opinion of the person in terms of whether an article didnt meet their expectations when they vote 1 for example. I understand voting is a persons opinion as they might vote or not but also would like to find out whether such voting does not necessary deter people away from your article.

• If you reference your previous work, include a link to it, don't just say "my previous article". The way article are stored on CodeProject does not allow people to easily sort them by time, and even if was easy, who would want to find it? You need to make "my previous article" the link (this would be the best), or somehow clearly indicate that some link is directly related to these words, instead of carrying it away from them.
• There is standard maximum string length for code (some thing like 80 characters, but check it up). You can see if you exceed it when you edit the code in CodeProject submission wizard. If you exceed it, your intended code formatting is screwed up due to word wrapping. I don't say this is the best representation of code in HTML, but this is what it is. After all, you are the one who want your code to be well readable, not only your readers.
• Most people don't care, but for me, a fan of good books and good typography, this is a little crime: long dash used to syntactically break a sentence is not '-', it is — (using HTML character entities, can be expressed as — – can also be used, alternatively).
• Code project reserves special CSS styles for the downloadable code. Also, it should be on the very top. If you use these styles, everyone can see the standard CodeProject download icon and clearly see where the downloads are. How to use it? Use the code submission wizard and locate the link on the right of the input area, where your uploaded files are. It automatically inserts the file in a proper way. You can edit any of your articles and fix it.
• Finally and most importantly, try to explain if first like, why the reader could be interested to read your article. You say nothing. Why it can be considered important, useful or somehow interesting to some? You just say, it demonstrate this and that, I develop this, etc. So what? The reader don't want to read everything developed by some people.

But remember: if you write really important, serious, innovative, (which always means somewhat controversial) content, this would be the best and most interesting content, but, as a result down-votes may only grow; you might even take pride out of it.