Contributing to the blog

1. Fork this repository and clone.
2. Create a new blog post file in the drafts folder with the file name post-title.adoc.
3. Write your blog post in there then create a pull request with @lauracowen and anyone else as reviewer.
4. After resolving any problems and making any edits, Laura will publish the post by moving it to the publish folder and renaming the file to YYYY-MM-DD-post-title.adoc.

Blogs are written in AsciiDoc format with a file extension of .adoc.

In the blog post file the following front matter variables must be set:

• layout: post
• title: title of the blog post
• categories: blog
• author_picture: secure url to author picture
  • If a picture cannot be found, the openliberty.io logo can be used instead https://avatars3.githubusercontent.com/u/28316667
• author_github: secure url to author github
• blog_description: Description of blog post used in the preview card on openliberty.io/blog
  • Please keep your blog_description to around 60 words
• seo-title: Blog Title used in search results and on social media - OpenLiberty.io
  • Please ensure that your seo-title ends with - OpenLiberty.io
• seo-description: Blog Description used in search results and on social media
  • Please keep your seo-description between 50-300 characters

drafts folder contains blog posts that are still in draft and are not ready to be published

publish folder contains blog posts that are ready to be published

img/blog folder contains images used in the blog adoc files

Once approved (ask lauracowen, or NottyCode as backup, to review/approve your PR), the blog post will be moved from drafts to publish.

Adding tags to your blog post

To add tags to your post, please open a pull request with your edits to blog_tags.json. You simply need to add the title of your post (without the date and file extension) to the posts array under the tags you want to use. (For example, if the file name is 2019-08-15-blog-post.adoc, you would just add "blog-post").

You can request a review from ellenwyllie or steven1046 if you are unsure who to ask.

Blog posts with multiple authors

If you would like to publish a blog post with more than 1 author, you can add the additional_authors attribute to the liquid front matter. Any number of additional authors can be specified using the following format:

additional_authors: 
 - name: author 2 first and last name
   github: secure url to author 2 github
   image: secure url to author 2 picture
 - name:  author 3 first and last name
   github: secure url to author 3 github
   image: secure url to author 3 picture

Contributing a third party blog post

If you would like to add a blog post that is actually a link to an existing third party blog post, you can follow the normal steps described above for creating a blog post. You simply need to add the following attributes to the liquid front matter:

• redirect_link: secure_url_to_3rd_party_post
• permalink: /blog/redirected.html

Also provide a level 1 heading eg:

= Creating a cool app with MicroProfile

Troubleshooting

Certain characters (eg apostrophe ' ) in the main heading are displayed incorrectly. To fix, escape with a backslash (\). eg = Minimise turnaround times with Open Liberty\'s dev mode

Docker container for development

Github.com does a pretty good job of rendering asciidoc so you can preview your file there, but to see exactly what it will look like you'll need to install the website software and run it.

Running the website on your local machine

git clone https://github.com/OpenLiberty/blogs.git
git clone https://github.com/OpenLiberty/openliberty.io.git
docker pull kinueng/openliberty.io

Replace "currentFolder" in the following command with the full path to the folder you are in.

docker run --name website -it -p 4000:4000 -v currentFolder/openliberty.io:/home/jekyll kinueng/openliberty.io

# example when current directory is /Users/bruce/projects/blog/website:
# docker run --name website -it -p 4000:4000 -v /Users/bruce/projects/blog/website/openliberty.io:/home/jekyll kinueng/openliberty.io

Update the running container with your edits

Before your new or updated blog entry will appear on the website, you will need to run the commands below to update the container with your latest changes, then wait for the container to finish processing them. Then you can see your changes at http://localhost:4000/blog/

Note that blogs named with dates in the future, e.g. 2099-01-05, will not be shown, so don't do that.

docker exec -it website rm -rf /home/jekyll/src/main/content/_drafts /home/jekyll/src/main/content/_posts /home/jekyll/src/main/content/img/blog
docker cp blogs/drafts website:/home/jekyll/src/main/content/_drafts
docker cp blogs/publish website:/home/jekyll/src/main/content/_posts
docker cp blogs/img/blog website:/home/jekyll/src/main/content/img

How to know when your changes are rendered by the container

You will see Jekyll detect your new files and regenerate the blog files. You will want to wait for the line "...done in XXXX seconds."

      Regenerating: 101 file(s) changed at 2018-10-29 18:53:10
      ...
      Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
      ...
            ...done in 121.8705398 seconds.

Restarting the container

If you try to run the docker run.... command above when the container already exists or has been stopped, you'll get an error like this:

docker: Error response from daemon: Conflict. The container name "/website" is already in use by container "ddc88f127404e8df53ad149245f636a54f6d5b501ac93477985c27a12b061a94". You have to remove (or rename) that container to be able to reuse that name.

Instead, run docker start website.

If the container's been stopped (you pressed control-c, didn't you?) you can run docker ps -a to get it's container id, then run docker rm [containerid] to remove it. Then issue the docker run command again.

There's no feedback about what it's doing. If you run docker ps, you can see that the website container is now running. However, it takes a few mins for the whole site to come back up so that you can access it from 0.0.0.0:4000 in your browser. So be patient.

When you can access 0.0.0.0:4000, run the four commands above to update the running container with your new edits (starting with the docker exec.... command).