How to Draft a Blog Post

How to Draft a Blog Post

 

There are three primary options:

• (Easiest) Draft it as a markdown file or Google doc and send it to @mateoclarke or @mscarey.
• (Hardest) Clone the open-austin-org repo to your local computer and submit your draft via a Pull Request to master. If you need an app to edit Markdown files, try [VS Code)(https://code.visualstudio.com/). The main advantage to this option is that you can preview what the post will look like on your local machine before deploying.
• (Recommended) Try drafting it on Github.com

 

How to draft on Github.com

1. Go to: https://github.com/open-austin/open-austin.github.io/tree/master/_posts
2. Create a new file (see image)

3. name the file YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-article.md

   • EX: open-austin.github.io/_posts/2016-03-10-code-across-austin-2016-recap.md

4. Use the template below in your new markdown file. (It's called YML Front Matter). A small gotcha: Jekyll doesn't like if you include the character : in a string. For example, if the title of your post was 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jekyll would barf. To avoid this, either don't use : or wrap your string in quotes, like title: "2001: A Space Odyssey".

    ---
    layout: post
    title: Title of your article
    date: YYYY-MM-DD
    type: post
    published: true
    thumb: filename.jpg
    thumbalt: Alt text describing the thumbnail
    author:
      first_name: First
      last_name: Last
    ---
    Begin your the body content of your post here. Use markdown syntax.
   

5. Draft the body of the post below the --- in Markdown and/or HTML (Markdown compiles to HTML).

   • It can be nice to include Twitter embeds in the body of your post. Just a note that if you have more than one tweet embedded you only need to include Twitter's script (<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>) once. This is just a small (probably insignificant) performance suggestion.

6. Upload the thumbnail image (aka: featured image) you specified in the front matter to the assets/images directory. You should be able to click the "Upload files" button.

   • All other photos you want to include in the body of the post also need to be uploaded here and referenced in the post as ![alt text describing the image](/assets/images/imagefile-name.jpg).
   • Thumbnail images shouldn't be wider than 250px.
   • Body images shouldn't be wider than 778px but 500px is recommended.

7. Once you are done drafting the file and uploading images, save your file creating a new branch, opening a pull request and requesting someone to review and merge.