An example article workflow

[dreamalligator]

Title: Example Article Workflow
Date: 2014-09-13
Author: Tom Spalding
Tags: pelican, blogging about blogs, publishing, workflows
Category: tutorial
Slug: example-article-workflow
Summary: A meta article workflow for new ACM writers! This is an example article post that goes over the basic steps in contributing to the sfsu.acm.org blog.

Congratulations all new ACM officers! Welcome new members!

Since, I've handed down the web reigns to @bestkao yesterday at the pizza social, I thought I'd make another example workflow for a user who is a guest article writer; this means any of you up-and-coming ACM technical writers out there! Doing this without using my beloved Grunt or our Makefile for example sake.

First time

The first time you download the repo, you're going to have to do some basic setup steps.

1. Fork the repo. It will likely rename itself to acm-sfsu.github.io. I renamed mine to sfsu.acm.org again.
2. If you are working on the template, fork this too. Otherwise, just clone. Our current template is acm-sfsu/pelican-cait. It goes in themes/pelican-cait.
3. Install the [dependencies](The first time you download the repo, you're going to have to do some basic setup steps such as downloading the dependencies). Make sure to make an issue if your setup is different so that other people can follow and that the tutorials are updated.
4. Run pelican and open the index.html or article-post.html generated in the output folder in your browser of choice. For example, firefox ~/projects/sfsu.acm.org/output/example-article-workflow.html. Did you get any errors? No? Great, continue on.
5. The Pelican docs are a great source if you need any help.

Write the article

1. I write all of my articles using Markdown, you'll need to install this if you want to use it. Otherwise reStructuredText is supported by default. See Writing Content.
2. Check out some of the other articles' metadata to see what you should write. At minimum you should use Title, Date, Author[s]. Authors is a comma-separated list of article authors, otherwise use Author.
3. Write that article!!! I like to use Atom because it has a default plugin that you can just type ctrl+shift+m and preview a page in Markdown.

Commit your code

After saving...

1. git add -A to add all your changes.
2. Then git commit -m 'adds my article'.
3. git push origin source, where source is our branch that all our code is in.
4. Make a pull request for your article!
5. Your article will then be merged by the ACM Github Org's Web Team.

There are probably going to be a lot of tutorials in the future, so besides making an article; a wiki, readme update, or a tutorial label might be the consensus for such things. It is up to you. I put this in the tutorial category, Category: tutorial.

This is a great way for you to get acquainted with Git, social coding, and is something you can add to your resume! It is also just fun. :) I encourage all of you to contribute on any topic that interests you, this is your club.

Have a great semester everyone!

Cheers,
Tom