Occassional

Editorial Policy

How Occassional researches, writes, sources, corrects, and maintains its guides — and how advertising is kept separate from editorial content.

Research standards

Every guide starts from the actual mechanics of the activity it covers: what it costs, how long it realistically takes, what could go wrong, and what a reasonable version of "done" looks like. We do not write from a fixed template and fill in a new keyword — a preserving guide is structured around food safety and process; a travel guide around timing, booking windows, and contingency planning; a home project guide around materials, sequencing, and safety. The structure follows the subject, not the other way around.

Source preference

Most guides here are practical how-to content — assembling a gift, planning a weekend, building a checklist — and don't require external citation any more than a recipe card would. Where a guide makes a claim that carries real safety or financial consequences if wrong, we link to a specific, current, authoritative source rather than asserting it as our own expertise. In order of preference, that means:

We do not cite personal blogs, unverified forum posts, or content-farm articles as sources for factual or safety claims. A guide's "Sources & further reading" section, when present, lists exactly what was used and links directly to it — no vague "studies show" attributions.

Factual verification

Before a source link is added to a guide, we check that the linked page is live, current, and actually supports the specific claim being made — not just topically related. When we find that a previously linked source has moved, been retired, or no longer supports the claim as written, we update the guide's text and the link rather than leaving a stale citation in place.

Safety and health content

Any guide involving heat, cold, sharp tools, food safety, or physical exertion includes a plain-language safety note appropriate to that activity, and names who should use extra caution or skip the activity entirely. Wellness content on Occassional is written as ordinary lifestyle guidance — reasonable, non-medical choices like a protected sleep-in or a screen-free evening — never as medical advice, and guides say explicitly when a topic is better suited to a professional than a weekend framework.

What we do not do

Update process

Guides are revisited periodically rather than published once and abandoned. Updates typically address outdated cost ranges, broken or superseded source links, thin sections that needed real expansion, and factual corrections. When a guide has been substantively updated since its original publish date, both dates are shown on the guide page.

Corrections

If you spot an error — a broken link, an outdated figure, a factual mistake, or a safety concern — please use the contact form. Every message is read. Confirmed errors are corrected directly in the guide, and we don't leave a known error live because a correction is inconvenient.

Commercial and advertising separation

Occassional carries advertising to help keep the site free to use. Ad placements are visually and structurally separated from guide content — they do not appear inside the body of a guide's instructions, and they are not disguised as editorial recommendations. Guides are written to be useful independent of whether a reader clicks an ad. We do not accept payment to write a favorable guide about a specific product or business, and we do not alter factual or safety content to favor an advertiser.

AI-assisted content policy

Some drafting and editing work on Occassional is AI-assisted, the same way a writer might use a word processor's grammar tools or a research assistant. AI assistance is not a substitute for human judgment here: every guide is reviewed, fact-checked against real sources where relevant, and edited by a person before it's published, and no guide represents AI-generated experience, opinions, or claims of personal testing as human authorship.

For more on what Occassional is and who operates it, see About.