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2019 Call For Papers

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Romain Lafourcade edited this page May 26, 2019 · 11 revisions

With 2019 well under way, it's about time to open this year's Call For Papers.

Our mission

Our mission with Vimways is to significantly increase the general quality of Vim-related content available on the Web. To do that, we intend to publish one high quality article on Vim every day from December 1 to December 24.

What to contribute?

You can submit articles, screencasts, tutorials, feedback from past experience, etc. as long as they satisfy the following criteria:

  • Your submission must be wholly or partially created by you. If it's a group effort, make sure:

    • the others are OK with their work being published on Vimways,
    • proper attributions are made.

  • Your submission must be primarily about Vim or its "ancestors": Elvis, Vi, Ex, or Ed. Other editors, IDEs, and tools can be mentioned in relation with one of the editors listed above but they can't be the main focus of your submission. For example, talking about Tmux/Vim integration is perfectly fine, but talking exclusively about Tmux is not and talking mainly about Tmux is dubious at best. Similarly, you can talk at length about the hardships of switching from $EDITOR to Vim but we are not interested in hearing about how to replicate Vim features in $EDITOR.

  • Your submission must be written or spoken primarily in English. If you are not a native speaker, do your best and we will help you make it perfect.

Guidelines

Content-wise, here is a quick and dirty list of writing prompts (that mostly tell about the main curator's own interests, not an exhaustive or prescriptive list by any means):

  • best practices for your setup,
  • make your setup truly cross-platform,
  • the ideal learning path,
  • how to integrate vim with its environment,
  • using Vim for weird things (music, statistical analysis, painting, etc.),
  • when to look for a plugin,
  • what to look for in a plugin,
  • editing best practices,
  • vimscript is not that bad/hard,
  • debunking common misconceptions,
  • listing valuable resources (and explaining why they are valuable),
  • everything you never thought you wanted to know about $FEATURE,
  • let me talk to you about my convoluted way to become a vimmer,
  • state of the nation,
  • long-term trends in plugin design (async, lsp, etc.),
  • a view at operators from a linguistics point of view,
  • when is Vim everywhere too much,
  • history behind $DESIGN_CHOICE,
  • etc.

and another list of things we don't want unless they improve a lot on their respective archetypes:

  • Vim as an IDE,
  • lists of plugins,
  • you absolutely need my config,
  • etc.

For more inspiration, take a look at the first edition.

Length-wise, anything above 1,500 words is fine.

Quality-wise, the more you know your stuff the better, but we will certainly take a critical look at your production. Don't apply if you can't handle that kind of pressure.

ROI-wise, there's no personal gain to make from any of that unless you count online reputation as personal gain: no ad revenue, currency, or assets will be involved. If there's anything to gain from that effort it would be a better average quality of Vim content available to new users.

When to contribute?

Among other issues, the first edition suffered from a short submission window that was too close to the publication period. We hope this year's CFP to be smoother:

  • Opening date: May 1 2019.
  • Closing date: October 31 2019.

How to contribute?

  1. Fork this repo.
  2. Clone your fork somewhere on your machine.
  3. Move into the project and do $ hugo new --kind vimways 2019/my-cool-article-about-macros to bootstrap a new post.
  4. Start the server with $ hugo server -DF and visit http://localhost:1313/.
  5. Be creative.
  6. Commit and push your work to your fork.
  7. Create a Pull Request here.

Directory structure

Your post exists as a directory under content/2019/:

content/
  └─ 2019/
      └─ my-cool-article-about-macros/
          ├─ assets/
          └─ index.md

  • Whatever you do must be done in that directory and that directory alone.

  • The only mandatory file in that directory is index.md so you can remove/rename assets/ or add any directory or file, as needed.

Markdown

index.md is seeded with fake content to give you an idea of what your post is expected to look like.

  • Refer to this document and this one if your Markdown-fu is rusty.

  • Hard-wrapped Markdown is nice to the eyes but hard to diff correctly and thus not very PR-friendly. Please use soft-wrapping.

  • If embedding an asciicast from asciinema.org, make sure it is properly associated with your account. If it's not they will archive it after seven days, which will hurt you and Vimways readers.

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