How to get started with codedamn student writing internship?

Codedamn is onboarding students on the path of becoming their best selves. Each student, developer, and designer comes with a single goal – to master coding and their goal becomes our goal. 

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re one of the selected ones. So, whether you’re here to elevate your career as a technical content writer, as a freelancer or as someone who wants to build their profile and resume – we’re going to learn how this program works, how you’re going to write, what you’re going to write and how this program will help you achieve your goals. 

Let’s get started!

How long is this internship?

This Writing Internship is a two-month long program where we expect you to write at your own pace, experiment and research the technologies you like, connect and network with other writers and grow yourself on the platform. 

This internship, based on your performance can also extend up to 6 months. However, there are some terms and conditions applied. In order to get your internship extended, you would need to submit 20 articles in your initial internship period – that is – in the first two months, upon which you would have the opportunity to work for another four months. 

Introducing codedamn.com/write

To make the process of writing and managing articles easy for you, we’ve set up the writer’s dashboard for you (access it here: https://codedamn.com/write), where you would be able to – pick an article from a list, write on the chosen topic, and manage your articles.

Let’s take a deeper dive into how to write from the writer’s dashboard.

Dashboard Screen

The dashboard screen would include your daily, weekly, and monthly stats about your writing.   This section is still under construction and will be launched soon.

Pick Article

This pick article panel would give you access to a cumulative list of all the topics you can write on. The list is also filtered by tag to help you search for your choice of topic easily. Some important points:

1. To choose a topic, simply click on the “Pick Article” option under the “Actions” tab, upon which the article would be assigned to you. 
2. Once you pick an article, you will have up to 4 days to write an article on the topics you’ve picked and submit a draft, and failure to do so will release your articles back to the article list for everyone to pick on. 
3. You can pick at max 5 articles from the list with a “pending” publishing status (i.e. we allow you to parallelly work and block 5 articles from the article list)

My Articles

Once you select a topic to write about, it will be removed from the article list and will be added to My Picked Articles page. Some important points on this:

1. The “My Picked Articles” is a panel where you would find all the articles that you’ve chosen to write about, along with their status
2. In order to submit an article, you have to write it first on WordPress (read about it in the next section).
3. Click on the Submit Article button you see, and paste your WordPress draft blog link (more information on this in the next section)
4. Once you submit your article, you will be able to see its status ie. whether your article is approved/ rejected or needs revision. 

How to write articles on codedamn WordPress CMS?

Clicking on “Write Article” will redirect you to https://wp.codedamn.com/wp-admin. We use WordPress to manage our content.

Let us understand how to work with WordPress in this small guide.

Setting up your access

The first step is to make sure your access is working properly. When you visit wp.codedamn.com, you’ll be greeted with the following screen:

This is HTTP Basic Auth protection. This is not your WordPress login. It only exists to protect our WordPress blog from bots/SEO indexing.

Simply enter visitor as the username here and codedamn$ as the password here. Once you do that, you’ll be redirected to the login page. If not, visit https://wp.codedamn.com/wp-admin

Here, you’re supposed to enter the individual credentials you received in your inbox. Once you log in, you’ll see the dashboard area.

Your setup access is now complete.

Writing your first article

Writing your first article could be intimidating. Let me walk you through how you can do that on WordPress.

• Click on Posts on the left (from your dashboard)

• Click on Add New post

• You’ll come to a section where you can write your posts now. The blog which you’re reading is also written here. Every blog post will have a title and the post contents

• That’s it! Start writing your blog post here. Your blog would be saved automatically from time to time. Once you’re done, click on the button on the top right saying “Save Draft”.
• Finally, copy your blog draft URL, and paste it into the submission alert box of “My Articles” on https://codedamn.com/write/my-articles

Best practices for writing a technical blog

Here are a few important points that you should make sure of when writing your blog on codedamn:

• Plagiarism is strictly prohibited
• Use tools like Grammarly.com to check for bad grammar/plagiarism before submitting
• Use heading tags properly. Your title of the blog post is the only `h1` heading. Keep main headings in your articles as `h2` and then subtopic headings as `h3` and so on.
• Your blog slug should be short, concise, and crisp – it should ideally include a main keyword from the blog. 

• You should select a proper category for your blog. Only select one category here.

• Your code should be formatted with the Code Editor on WordPress

That’s it. You’re now ready to write awesome blog posts on codedamn!