How to use the MCT Blog ‐ Prerequisites
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In order to post and work on the MCT Blog you need the following:
- a GitHub account and request to mct-info@imv.uio.no for access to MCT-master repositories (in the email, specify your GitHub username)
- a UiO account and request to mct-info@imv.uio.no for access to MCT folders (in the email, specify your UiO username)
- install GitHub Desktop
- install VS Code and the recommended extensions
- install Jekyll
For detailed instruction on the above, refer to the software you need guide.
If you are familiar with the command line version of Git and you prefer to use that, you should be able to easily replicate all the steps of this guide involving GitHub Desktop. The video tutorials in this guide were developed using Atom as a source-code editor. Atom (developed by GitHub) used to be the preferred source-code editor for the MCT programme, until it was discontinued and replaced by VS Code (developed by Microsoft, which acquired GitHub). You should be able to replicate all steps using VS Code (or your own preferred editor) instead of Atom, as the two editors are fairly similar and we only make a basic usage.
Blog posts are written in Markdown, which is a simple plain text formatting syntax aimed at making writing for the internet easier. Here you find an details on the basic Markdown syntax. If you want to experiment and try out writing Markdown, you can try this demo.
In the MCT Blog, the markdown files are automatically converted into HTML by kramdown, which is a Markdown superset converter, which supports also HTML language. Therefore, to improve the aspect of the blog posts, or to integrate multimedia material other than images, we often use short snippets of HTML code, which are provided and explained in the Embedding and Storage of Files.
If you need more guidance with Markdown, you can follow this short crash course.
