This is the GitHub Pages repo for the TMS website. As with all GitHub Pages sites, it runs on Jekyll.

Contributing to the blog is easy. That said, these instructions assume you're familiar with GitHub and understand how to do things like clone repos and create pull requests. If that sounds foreign, find a nerd and ask them for help.

Posts are written in Markdown. Here's a couple good resources for that:

• Writing posts - from the Jekyll docs
• Markdown Cheatsheet - a good syntax reference
• Minimalist Online Markdown Editor - a nice web-based editor

Whatever editor you choose to write your post in, at some point you'll need to add it to this repo for review and posting. Here's how you'd do that:

1. Clone the repo
2. Create a branch for yourself and give it a descriptive name, like darwin-sketch-tips-post
3. Locate the blog posts directory in /_posts/blog/
4. Add a file for your post, following the guidelines below and referencing other posts
5. Commit and push your branch as needed to track your progress
6. When you're ready to have the post reviewed, create a pull request and inform the #tms_blog channel on Slack that your post is up for review
7. Address feedback as needed
8. Merge your pull request to master to publish it. Tada! 🎉

Posts have filenames like 2017-04-01-sketch-tips-for-leet-hackers.md. The first part is the publish date in yyyy-mm-dd format.

⚠️ Using a future date will not prevent your post from going live immediately. If you want to keep it unpublished until a specific date, add published: false to the front matter (see below) and remove it on that date.

The rest of the filename becomes the URL slug. Remember to update this if you change the name of your post while writing. After the post is published, avoid making changes to the filename, since that will break inbound links to the old URL and throw a wrench into page analytics.

Jekyll posts have what's called Front matter at the top of the file. This is a YAML block of optional variables, and it looks like this:

---
title: "Sketch Tips for Leet Hackers"
author: Darwin Campa
categories: Design Tutorials
tags: tips Sketch
---

There are lots of other variables you can use, but those are the essentials for TMS blog posts.

The categories and tags variables are lists and can be space-separated or, if you have spaces within your tags, in bracket form like this:

tags: [tips, Sketch, a tag with spaces]

To make browsing easier, try to choose one or more categories for your post from the established list below. If you feel that your post needs a new category, go ahead and add it and we'll discuss it during review.

• Android
• Culture
• Development
• Design
• iOS
• Libraries
• Open-Source
• Product
• Testing
• Tutorials

Tags can be anything you want. They are used to associate related content, so if you use the tag "pickles," other posts tagged with "pickles" will show up in the sidebar on your post and vice versa.

Note that categories are title-case, whereas tags should be lowercase except for proper nouns and abbreviations (e.g., Apple, AAPL). This is just a stylistic preference we've set for our blog.

If your post has headings, start them at the H3 level, which looks like this in Markdown:

### I'm a heading!

This gives you 4 levels of headings to work with (H3, H4, H5, and H6). If you need more than that, your post is probably too long.

If your post has supporting images, you can create a folder in /assets/ using the name of your post, for example: /assets/2017-04-01-sketch-tips-for-leet-hackers/ and upload your images there.

When your post is shared, it appears with a generic TMS graphic. If you want to use a different image (you do!), you can specify it using the featured-image front matter variable:

featured-image: assets/2017-04-01-sketch-tips-for-leet-hackers/kittens.jpg

Facebook has some sizing guidelines for this image.

The post excerpt is the part that shows in the list, before you click through to the post detail page. By default, this is the first paragraph of your post, but you can specify the break anywhere by adding <!--more--> on a new line.

If this is your first post, you'll need to add yourself to the _data/authors.yml file. Your Ket avatar should already be uploaded, so you just need to specify the path to it. If you'd rather not use your Ket, you can upload another avatar or use your Gravatar.