authorship

authorship is how to indicate who the author is for a post, and an algorithm that determines the author of a post.

Why

You should clearly indicate who is the author of a post so when other sites summarize or reply to your post, they can properly recognize the author(s)!

How to

How to publish

Publishing your authorship of a post is designed to be both easy and flexible to adapt to a variety of publishing methods and designs. Any of the following are fine.

Choose whichever is the least work for you, your site, your theme(s), your code, and easiest for you to maintain!

posts:

• h-entry markup on your posts including an explicit p-author or u-author (preferably enhanced with an embedded h-card, e.g. <a class="u-author h-card" href="/">…</a> if your posts have your name, photo etc. already visible)
• OR if you have an h-card on your website (e.g. from a global template for your header or footer) that links to your homepage, then add a minimal <a class="u-author" href="/"></a> inside your post h-entry.

streams of posts (like on an archive, homepage, etc.) without explicit authorship per post:

• h-feed markup including an explicit p-author or u-author ((preferably enhanced with an embedded h-card as described above)
• OR if you have an h-card on your website (e.g. from a global template for your header or footer) that links to your homepage, then add a minimal <a class="u-author" href="/"></a> inside your h-feed.

separate author description pages (e.g. when using u-author)

• h-card with information about you on your author description page (e.g. homepage)

Validate

Try this authorship testing tool to validate your authorship markup - it will tell you how the authorship algorithm finds your author information on a permalink:

• https://sturdy-backbone.glitch.me/

How to determine

See authorship-spec.

See Also

• discovery
• posts
• h-entry
• h-card
• rel-author
• https://sturdy-backbone.glitch.me/ – simple testing tool by Sven Knebel showing how the algorithm plays out for a given URL