How to Post to this Blog
January 12, 2018, by Moacir
Hopefully, by the time you read this post, you’ll already be familiar with Markdown, Atom, Git, & GitHub. You’ll also have a GitHub account, you’ll be added to the NewYorkScapes GitHub group, and you’ll have posting privileges to this blog.
As you know, Git works with projects or repositories, not with single files. This blog, then, is such a project, made up of many smaller files that get mixed together to make what you see in your browser. Your task, in order to write a post, then, is simple:
- you will create a file
- you will fill the file with your thoughts
- you will add the file to the project by saving-staging-committing-pushing
I hope the middle step is the hardest. The rest of this post will detail the other two steps…
All of the blog posts for this blog live as individual files inside the
_posts folder in this project. You should see it in Atom. The first step,
then, is to make sure that the file you will be creating is in that folder.
Next, the file’s name has to follow a very specific format:
2018-nn-mm-some-title-here.md
The nn is the month, with a zero, and the mm is the day, with a zero. Then
you need a hyphen between the data and the rest, which is words separated by
hyphens that identify the file. The last part, the .md, lets the computer
know that you’re typing a Markdown file. In order to create this file, then,
you click on the _posts folder like in the picture, so that it’s
highlighted, and then type the letter a. A little box should show up that
asks you to enter the name, so you type something like:
_posts/2018-nn-mm-some-title-here.md
If all went well, that _posts/ is already in the text box.
Now you have a blank document in Atom. You must paste in the following for the first four lines:
---
title: How to Post to this Blog
author: mds17
---
Where it says title:, you can replace my title with your own. And you should
also change author: to your NYU netid. Note that both “title” and “author”
are in lowercase. Also remember that this is four lines, meaning you need that
--- on the top and --- on the bottom. Of course, you can always look at
other posts in the _posts folder—like this one—for tips.
Next is that tricky part of filling in the content with your thoughts.
When you’re done, you pull from github and then save-stage-commit-push. But, as always, you can save as much as you want before you stage-commit, and commit as much as you want before you push. But you should typically only push once—when you like what you’ve got.
And that’s it!