We Are All Awesome

A blog with the intention of motivating, encouraging, and helping people begin speaking at conferences.

The site contains/will contain advice on generating ideas and writing proposals, links to great talks, conferences with open CFPs, etc.

How Contribute

Powered with Github Pages + Jekyll

This blog is powered with Github Pages, which is powered with Jekyll.

The magic: If your repository has a branch named gh-pages, Github automatically creates Github Pages for the repo. If you want to have a blog, you can have just a branch called gh-pages. Ta da!

Text format

All the posts are written in markdown. If you're not familiar with markdown, check out Daring Fireball's syntax guide.

Adding a blog post

Posts go in the _posts directory, and must be named YYYY-MM-DD-the-title-of-the-post.md

Start it off with the following:

---
layout: main
title: The Title of the Post
---

# {{ page.title }}

(where you'd swap out The Title of the Post with the actual title, obviously).

Then add whatever content you want below this header. Write your post in markdown.

Eyeballing Your Changes

For small changes, you can safely make a pull request without previewing the changes.

To preview your changes to the site on your machine, you must use Jekyll to build the HTML version and serve the files.

First, be sure you have Jekyll installed:

gem install jekyll

Second, in the root of the project, run jekyll --server to generate the HTML files, and start the server:

jekyll --server --auto

--auto enables live reload so you don't need to restart the server to see your changes.

When you run jekyll --server you'll probably see webrick start up. Look for the port number:

[2012-06-23 14:02:42] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=3642 port=4000

Here it started on port 4000, which is usual. That means that you can see your preview of the site at localhost:4000

If you have further questions, ask Uncle Google

Actual conversation (with typos corrected) from #stationx on freenode about how I need to write a README

theophani: so the key thing to google is "jekyll github pages"
theophani: I had never heard of it before either
theophani: and spent 2.5 hours being super frustrated that I could not figure out how
           to edit the site after @janl set it up for me.
theophani: he would have helped, if I'd asked.
theophani: warning: the actual github pages help are not helpful.
fnords:    i will use my google-fu to figure it out
theophani: intro: https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages
theophani: actual help: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/blob/master/README.textile
theophani: premise: if you have a branch named gh-pages, you automatically create
           github pages for the repo. if you want to have a blog, you can have JUST
           a branch called gh-pages
fnords:    aha!
ln2v:      oh, so they don't actually go into master?
theophani: exactly
theophani: I should copy and paste this conversation as the readme :D
ln2v:      feel free! ;)

station x (cc)