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 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!

Authorship for individual posts

For individual posts, (such as a post displayed on its permalink), you have a few options for how to provide authorship information:

• 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.

Authorship for streams of posts

For a page with a stream of posts (like on an archive, homepage, etc.), you may want to avoid duplicating authorship information on each individual 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/

You can use the preview feature of Monocle to see if a feed or post will look good in a reader:

• https://monocle.p3k.io/preview

How to determine

See authorship-spec.

See Also

• authorship-spec
• 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