Creating Blog Posts

The core of the Programming Historian website is the lessons directory, but occasionally we have news that is better shared in a blog post. Here's what to do in such cases.

Naming the Post

First, create a new file in the _posts directory. Make the filename conform to this pattern:

 YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-post.md

Substitute the actual date for the abbreviations, of course. A real example filename would look like this:

 2013-08-24-new-navigation.md

Don't forget the .md extension at the end.

Post Front-Matter

The metadata front matter for a post should look like this:

---
title: New Navigation
author: Miriam Posner
layout: post
categories: posts
---

You don't need to include a date, because that will be inferred from the filename.

Adding Author Avatar

The author info section at the bottom of each blog post includes an author photo. This photo should be a PNG file in the avatars directory whose name is the same as the author, except for a hyphen instead of a space.

So, to use the example post front matter above, there should be a Miriam-Posner.png photo file in avatars. This filename is case sensitive. If the post is written by someone who has not posted before, you'll need to add an avatar.