---

Link to blog: https://code-for-canada.github.io/omafra-updates/

Add a Post

Quick Start

Step 1) Create the file

Navigate to the _posts folder and click the Create new file button

Make sure to name the post in the format <YYYY-MM-DD-Post-Title>.md e.g. 2020-03-02-First-Month.md

Step 2) Add post data

At the top of the file add your post data in the format:

---
layout: post
title: <Your Post Title>
author: <Your Full Name>
banner: <Image File Name>
---

e.g.

---
layout: post
title: First Month at OMAFRA
author: Seyi Tayor
banner: sprint-0-banner.jpg
---

Don't worry This won't appear in the post, it's only used for the blog to pull some information about the post to be displayed.

Step 3) Add your content

Make sure to write your content in markdown format, I've included a link to a quick markdown guide below.

https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/

If you're editing your file on github.com you can click Preview Changes to view your post formatted in Markdown

(I'll talk about adding images to your post below, it's a little fussy)

Step 4) Publish your post

When your done editing on GitHub just scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Commit Changes

It should look something like this:

Step 5) Check out your work!

Now you can go to the blog and check out your post!

The post will be availabe at https://code-for-canada.github.io/omafra-updates/<your-post-title>

It may take a few minutes for your post to appear but don't worry, if you followed the instructions above it should be up shortly!

Add Images to Your Post

What's an article without pictures? I mean, I guess it's still an article but you should add some pictures anyway!

Here's how:

Step 1) Upload your image to github

If you're using an image hosted on another site you can skip straight to step 2

Navigate to the images folder and click Upload files right next to the Create new file button we saw before. Select your photo to upload and blah blah blah, you know how to upload files to stuff.

Note: Images will display at their actual size (up to a maximum width the same as the post body), make sure to edit the files so they're the size you want

Step 2) Add your image to a post

We're gonna use markdown notation here to add our image so it'll look a little funny

The markdown notation for images is ![<alt text that describes your image>](<https://your-image-url-here>)

To include an external image just copy and paste the full URL

To include an image hosted in our images folder (like we added in Step 1) use the path /omafra-updates/images/<your-file-name>

For example, to include the Code for Canada logo saved in /images add ![Code for Canada logo](/omafra-updates/images/cfc-web-logo.png)

You should see:

Note: These images won't work when you preview the post in the github editor, this is because of the way our blog is compiled when we publish. In order to preview your post with images change the path to /images/<your-file-name>, removing the /omafra-updates prefix, just make sure to add it back before publishing

Banner Images

I've added some special styling rules for banner images at the top of a post. If you want to include a banner image with your post make sure to include a banner item in your post data at the top of your file like the example below

---
layout: post
title: First Month at OMAFRA
author: Seyi Tayor
banner: sprint-0-banner.jpg
---

For now banners must be hosted in the images folder and cannot be external photos

Make sure to only include the file name in the post data, don't include /omafra-updates/images/ like you would for a normal image

Adding a Table of Contents

You can add an auto-generated Table of Contents to your posts with just a couple lines in your markdown file.

1. Contents
{:toc}

Add these two lines anywhere you want the ToC to appear (my preferance is right after the intro paragraph) and when the page is rendered your ToC will be auto-magically populated with all of the headers in your post.

Make sure you write informative headers!

Jekyll Now

Note: I've included the generic Jekyll Now README below

Code for Canada team blog quick start

(this assumes previous knowledge of github and access to the Code for Canada github org)

1. Clone Jekyll Now
2. Create your blog's repository in the Code for Canada github org
3. Push your Jekyll Now clone to your new repo
4. In your repo settings under Github Pages change source from gh-pages to master (or don't, I'm not a cop)
5. In _config.yml set baseurl (line 50) to your project name with a / in front (ex. this repo's baseurl is set to /omafra-updates)
6. Follow instructions in Jekyll Now generic README below starting from step 2

Open the Jekyll Now generic README

Jekyll Now

Jekyll is a static site generator that's perfect for GitHub hosted blogs (Jekyll Repository)

Jekyll Now makes it easier to create your Jekyll blog, by eliminating a lot of the up front setup.

• You don't need to touch the command line
• You don't need to install/configure ruby, rvm/rbenv, ruby gems ☺️
• You don't need to install runtime dependencies like markdown processors, Pygments, etc
• If you're on Windows, this will make setting up Jekyll a lot easier
• It's easy to try out, you can just delete your forked repository if you don't like it

In a few minutes you'll be set up with a minimal, responsive blog like the one below giving you more time to spend on writing epic blog posts!

Quick Start

Step 1) Fork Jekyll Now to your User Repository

Fork this repo, then rename the repository to yourgithubusername.github.io.

Your Jekyll blog will often be viewable immediately at https://yourgithubusername.github.io (if it's not, you can often force it to build by completing step 2)

Step 2) Customize and view your site

Enter your site name, description, avatar and many other options by editing the _config.yml file. You can easily turn on Google Analytics tracking, Disqus commenting and social icons here too.

Making a change to _config.yml (or any file in your repository) will force GitHub Pages to rebuild your site with jekyll. Your rebuilt site will be viewable a few seconds later at https://yourgithubusername.github.io - if not, give it ten minutes as GitHub suggests and it'll appear soon

There are 3 different ways that you can make changes to your blog's files:

1. Edit files within your new username.github.io repository in the browser at GitHub.com (shown below).
2. Use a third party GitHub content editor, like Prose by Development Seed. It's optimized for use with Jekyll making markdown editing, writing drafts, and uploading images really easy.
3. Clone down your repository and make updates locally, then push them to your GitHub repository.

Step 3) Publish your first blog post

Edit /_posts/2014-3-3-Hello-World.md to publish your first blog post. This Markdown Cheatsheet might come in handy.

You can add additional posts in the browser on GitHub.com too! Just hit the + icon in /_posts/ to create new content. Just make sure to include the front-matter block at the top of each new blog post and make sure the post's filename is in this format: year-month-day-title.md

Local Development

1. Install Jekyll and plug-ins in one fell swoop. gem install github-pages This mirrors the plug-ins used by GitHub Pages on your local machine including Jekyll, Sass, etc.
2. Clone down your fork git clone https://github.com/yourusername/yourusername.github.io.git
3. Serve the site and watch for markup/sass changes jekyll serve
4. View your website at http://127.0.0.1:4000/
5. Commit any changes and push everything to the master branch of your GitHub user repository. GitHub Pages will then rebuild and serve your website.

Moar!

I've created a more detailed walkthrough, Build A Blog With Jekyll And GitHub Pages over at the Smashing Magazine website. Check it out if you'd like a more detailed walkthrough and some background on Jekyll. 🤘

It covers:

• A more detailed walkthrough of setting up your Jekyll blog
• Common issues that you might encounter while using Jekyll
• Importing from Wordpress, using your own domain name, and blogging in your favorite editor
• Theming in Jekyll, with Liquid templating examples
• A quick look at Jekyll 2.0’s new features, including Sass/Coffeescript support and Collections

Jekyll Now Features

✓ Command-line free fork-first workflow, using GitHub.com to create, customize and post to your blog
✓ Fully responsive and mobile optimized base theme (Theme Demo)
✓ Sass/Coffeescript support using Jekyll 2.0
✓ Free hosting on your GitHub Pages user site
✓ Markdown blogging
✓ Syntax highlighting
✓ Disqus commenting
✓ Google Analytics integration
✓ SVG social icons for your footer
✓ 3 http requests, including your avatar

✘ No installing dependencies ✘ No need to set up local development
✘ No configuring plugins
✘ No need to spend time on theming
✘ More time to code other things ... wait ✓!

Questions?

Open an Issue and let's chat!

Other forkable themes

You can use the Quick Start workflow with other themes that are set up to be forked too! Here are some of my favorites:

• Hyde by MDO
• Lanyon by MDO
• mojombo.github.io by Tom Preston-Werner
• Left by Zach Holman
• Minimal Mistakes by Michael Rose
• Skinny Bones by Michael Rose

Credits

• Jekyll - Thanks to its creators, contributors and maintainers.
• SVG icons - Thanks, Neil Orange Peel. They're beautiful.
• Solarized Light Pygments - Thanks, Edward.
• Joel Glovier - Great Jekyll articles. I used Joel's feed.xml in this repository.
• David Furnes, Jon Uy, Luke Patton - Thanks for the design/code reviews.
• Bart Kiers, Florian Simon, Henry Stanley, Hun Jae Lee, Javier Cejudo, Peter Etelej, Ben Abbott, Ray Nicholus, Erin Grand, Léo Colombaro, Dean Attali, Clayton Errington, Colton Fitzgerald, Trace Mayer - Thanks for your fantastic contributions to the project!

Contributing

Issues and Pull Requests are greatly appreciated. If you've never contributed to an open source project before I'm more than happy to walk you through how to create a pull request.

You can start by opening an issue describing the problem that you're looking to resolve and we'll go from there.

I want to keep Jekyll Now as minimal as possible. Every line of code should be one that's useful to 90% of the people using it. Please bear that in mind when submitting feature requests. If it's not something that most people will use, it probably won't get merged. 💂‍♂️