Become an author and write Windy Articles

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photo: rawpixel;
link: https://unsplash.com/photos/ZN97BfWuHhs;
desc: become the author and help others;
licence: cc;

What are Windy Articles?

Windy is here to help save lives or property by informing others about severe weather phenomena or state of Earth's climate. Windy Articles should help our users and other media to inform about these events, but not only that. We would like to educate others about weather and its dangers.

We believe that when severe weather happens, people have the right to be informed free of charge, and without advertisement or tracking cookies.

But not only that. Windy gives its readers a unique opportunity to see the described phenomena on an animated map, with Annotations (explained later).

We believe, that Windy Articles should be published under Creative Commons licence, CC-BY, so published information can be reused by newspapers, radios, TV and such, mentioning the author. We do not want to compete traditional media. We would help them spread the word, what can potentially happen.

If you are willing to contribute an article, Windy is not able to enumerate you for writing. Consider Windy as a Weather Wikipedia.

Who can write a Windy Article?

Anyone who is registered on this website and have the skills.

What types of Windy Articles there should be:

There are two types of articles. The articles that expire and articles that are permanent. Articles that expire should inform about forecasted or ongoing weather phenomena. Permanent articles should:

Educate about weather, forecasting and such
Inform about new features on Windy
Explain some high level functionality of Windy
Inform about new climatological studies, models and data sets
Reviews of forecast models, weather products and even reviews of weather-related hardware (like weather stations)

How to write a Windy Article?

You can write a Windy article here on the Windy Community website. Just create a new topic in any category, and you are done. The initial post will become the body of the article. In order to publish the article, use the tag article (at the bottom of the post).

Formatting the article

The article is written in markdown. However, our articles support ONLY header 3 ###, bold **, bullet lists, links and images. You can also embed YouTube and Twitter posts.

Working with images

Images make emotions, and emotions are the things, that can convince people in affected areas, that they can be hurt.

Make sure, that all the copyrights are of image author fulfilled.

Creative commons images can be found at these locations:

https://www.flickr.com/ - select "Modifications allowed" and check twice that image is CC
https://commons.wikimedia.org/
https://unsplash.com/

Upload your image as usual to your Article and then use ALT text for appropriate author credits. Markdown that is used have following format for imag: ![alt text](image url)

All info should be inside ALT text in the following format:
![photo: name of author; link: URL to author's page; desc: Description; licence: cc](...)

As you can see, that all the parameters are separated by ; and quotes are omitted. You newline to make your ALT tag more user friendly. The example of proper Alt tag looks like this:

![
   photo: NASA; 
   link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/10840840555;
   desc: Hurricane Ivo from Mir space station.;
   licence:cc;
](/assets/uploads/here-filename.jpg)

Supported type of licence is cc meaning CC-BY, so if you omit licence property at all image will be published as copyrighted one. And yes you can omit any of the field.

When uploading the photo, recommended width is 1200px and recommended format is jpg.

All photos used in articles MUST be server from community.windy.com/assets/uploads... (therefore uploaded from here in our servers). Any photos server from external URLs are considered security risk and filtered out. Sorry.

If you publish any photo that was created as Windy Screenshot, please make it Creative Commons so other media can reuse it.

Cover photo

The cover photo, the first nice photo with title, is inserted via our publishing tool article-publisher. We will be more than happy to provide cover photo for your article.

Map annotations

As of version 20.9.0 of Windy, we do not support annotations any more. Creating and maintaining Annotations was way too much complicated and almost nobody used it.

Display specific layer, location or graphics on a map

It is very easy to "program" what kind of place an content should be displayed on the map on the right side of the article.

Just go to Windy.com and select specific layer, location and zoom. Copy the URL and paste it at the end of an article. At the end of URL add colon and secret keyword internal.

This URL will be hidden in the article and causes map to show specific layer, location or zoom level. What is inside the URL will be simply on a map. You can even force weather picker to be opened, if windy.com will contain picker when you will copying URL.

If you want to display KML, GPX of geoJSON on a map, just use www.windy.com/uploader, upload your data and share the link with specific upload.

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Embedding Twitter, YouTube, FB video

To embed Twitter just paste URL in this format https://twitter.com/esowc_ecmwf/status/1097492125476970499 into the article. Please do not embed Tweets that just contain other Tweets. Embed always final Tweet.

To embed YouTube paste jut URL in this format https://www.yutube.com/watch?v=b6LLC7VVa7I

To embed FB video just paste URL in this format https://www.facebok.com/SeceshStageStop/videos/416960145741378/. To get this link right click on date-link in FB post with video and copy link.

Embedding Windy's videos

If you create stunning video at https://www.windy.com/animate you can embed it into the article by pasting URL of video file in the article body in this format https://i.windy.com/a/3/55i8k8.mp4. Make sure the URL as at the begging of the line, not inside the text.

Article notes

If you want to use some notes that should be visible just on Windy Community but are not published on Windy, use <hr /> html tag (use -------- in markdown) at the end of an article and write anything below.

What is below the last <hr /> is just a note.

Type of an article

There are two special types of articles. One of them is video type, which means, that first YouTube of Facebook video is prominent on article. The second special type is online which is article, that is updated often as the weather phenomena progresses. To use special type, just add video or online as a tag to your article.

Test your article on Windy

After you finish your article here on community, note down its topic ID. It is number that is visible in URL. For example article https://community.windy.com/topic/7914/video-c... has topic ID 7914.

Now type this URL to your browser https://www.windy.com/articles/7914, and here you are. Your article is just on Windy.

Publishing your article

Only users, that are part of a group https://community.windy.com/groups/publishers can publish articles on Windy. If you are not in group publishers, we will be more that happy to publish your article for you. Just let us know, that your article is finished.

We have decided that only following articles should make it to start-up page of Windy:

Severe or Extreme Warning
Announcement of new Windy feature or service or tutorial how to use Windy better
Any other important message, and as important I mean important in a field of meteorology

Whenever users see an article on start-up page of Windy, he should be grateful that he has new important information.

When publishing an article make sure that:

Expiration time is set correctly where applicable (never display obsolete warnings or forecasts)
The article is displayed only to users that need to see it. Use language and country filter for this

Please be aware that we may need to edit your texts or pictures in order to unify the format of all the articles and/or correct any grammar mistakes.

These are notes that will not be published on Windy. You can write here whatever you want.

mmmmmichael

Is this still a thing I can do?

Korina

@mmmmmichael Hi, sure, we would still welcome publishers to write articles for us.

mmmmmichael

@Korina Thanks! I love writing! I would love to start writing articles for you guys!

ColompinaW

@Korina, Sorry for the spam, I was just excited to get into this community, also, it wasn't on purpose...

ozhanco

thank you!!

Paolo Saracino

I would like to ask you for a piece of information about the possibility to write a weather article on windy.
In practice when I click on the link “ gallery.windy.com” it does not work anymore, consequently, I am not able to upload a picture as I write an article.
Could you help me to work the problem out?
Lots of greetings from Italy

Korina

@paolo-saracino Hello, your account on Gallery Windy is active, therefore it should work. Did you try to log out and log in again?

Paolo Saracino

@korina Hello Korina, the problem is that I always receive the message “ 403 Forbidden “, so I don't understand what’s going on

Korina

@paolo-saracino Hello, could you please send me via PM, list of your IP addresses, which you use for article posting?

giacomo.sintoni

Hi, can I publish sporadic articles about some important meteorological phenomena on the initial home page of Windy?

Giacomo

Korina

@giacomo-sintoni We usually publish articles about extreme weather events such as hurricane and cyclones. You can try to write weather related articles, we may publish it if it is relevant.

giacomo.sintoni

@korina Thank you!

Giacomo

Fred Smith 3

Thanks for such good article!

Fred Smith 3

Great info!

OliverHugo

Amazing content and informative for every newcomers. Thanks alot for putting effort on it.

KyleRhodes

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