PISK aims to have friendly, dynamic conversations on this site. Anything disrupting this discourse in a hateful or vulgar manner will not be tolerated. If you post an article or comment that hurts or attacks anyone without clear grounds, you can expect our top notch moderators to sniff it out and delete it. The same goes for relevancy. Our blog is centred around a Canadian perspective from post-secondary students and young professionals with a Polish connection. It is not a place to promote yourself or your business, though this is permissible if it is done in a relevant, interesting, and subtle way. We have zero tolerance for any of the following:
- Abusive comments (trolling, hate speech, slander, vulgarity for its own sake).
- Spam.
- Blatant and/or irrelevant self-promotion.
This is your site. Please let us know if there is a problem so, together, we can make this a safe place for everyone.
FAQS
If you’re just getting started with blogging for us, here are some quick tips on how to use PISK’s back-end:
- Use short URLs: pisk.ca/awesome-title is much easier to share, remember, looks nicer, and is just overall sexier than pisk.ca/great-descriptive-title-with-subtitle-like-youre-writig-a-paper-for-a-class.
- Link to relevant background material. Not everyone may know what Solidarność was. Hey, hover over this: to samo się odnosi do tłumaczeń (nawet jak nie doskonałe, są one lepsze niż nic). Neat, eh? What you just saw was the title of a link, which you can set up in the same dialogue that you use for adding the link itself.
- Decide on one language and stick with it: it’s either Wisła or Vistula, wódka or vodka—never Wisla or wodka. And if you do write a word/phrase in a tongue different than the majority of your article, italicize it (unless it is a proper noun of course). Run your posts through a simple spell-checker before posting. And please, use Polish spelling where appropriate. Someone like Roman Polanski might have lost his “ń” somewhere during his travels, but Madame Curie was always née Skłodowska. Wikipedia/Google any confusing terms. How do you set up a keyboard to type in Polish? We’ve got you covered.
- Embed YouTube links right into your post: Basically, find your video on YouTube, hit “Share” underneath it, select “Embed”, and copy the code in the white box. Then come back to your post, hit “HTML” on the top, right-hand corner of it while still in “edit” mode and paste the code you just copied, changing the “width” to 835 and you’re good to go! Using Vimeo? No biggie, just modify this code accordingly and plop it where you’d put the YT code from above: yourvid#here” height=”354″ width=”835″ frameborder=”0″>
- Adding pictures: Click on “Upload/Insert” above your post in “edit post mode”. A cute menu pops up into which you upload your picture, set its alignment, caption, and link, and then all you have to do is hit “Insert into post” at the bottom.
- Scale down your pictures. Uploading giants hurts everyone’s bandwidth; no point having 8×12m, 100,000 GB original resolution images on here. Codeplex’s free Image Resizer for Windows does the trick for batch-resizing photos to a reasonable 1920×1080p size with a simple right-click option.
- Help us curate. Use appropriate tags and categories (menus on the right-hand side in your “edit post” page). Every post is categorized as a “Blog Post” by default. As soon as you finish writing, uncheck “Blog Post” and check off 3-4 categories that fit your post. Same goes for tags, right below categories. Check out our most popular tags, and then add a new one if you think you should. Max tag count should not exceed 5. What does this mean to you? Simple: people searching keywords through Google have a higher cthance of coming upon properly-curated posts. Be sure to set a featured image too (just below “tags”, still on the right there). Without it, your post will look naked on the homepage and no one will click it.
- If you want everything you post (articles, comments) to have a beaming image of you floating nearby, you’ll want to set up a gravatar. Use the email you use to log into PISK.ca. Careful though: this image is hosted externally to the PISK server and so will follow you to any comment boards where you need to login to post in the future, given that you log in with the same email you use to set up this avatar.
More tips and tricks as we think of them.
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