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Writing a New Post

Posted 2019-08-08

This post will guide you how to write a post on Chirpy theme. Even if you have previous experience with Jekyll, this article is worth reading, because many features require specific variables to be set.

Naming and Path

Create a new file named YYYY-MM-DD-TITLE.EXTENSION and put it in the _posts of the root directory. Please note that the EXTENSION must be one of md and markdown. If you want to save time of creating files, please consider using the plugin Jekyll-Compose to accomplish this.

Front Matter

Basically, you need to fill the Front Matter as below at the top of the post:

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---
title: TITLE
date: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS +/-TTTT
categories: [TOP_CATEGORIE, SUB_CATEGORIE]
tags: [TAG]     # TAG names should always be lowercase
---

The posts’ layout has been set to post by default, so there is no need to add the variable layout in the Front Matter block.

Timezone of Date

In order to accurately record the release date of a post, you should not only set up the timezone of _config.yml but also provide the post’s timezone in variable date of its Front Matter block. Format: +/-TTTT, e.g. +0800.

Categories and Tags

The categories of each post are designed to contain up to two elements, and the number of elements in tags can be zero to infinity. For instance:

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---
categories: [Animal, Insect]
tags: [bee]
---

Author Information

The author information of the post usually does not need to be filled in the Front Matter , they will be obtained from variables social.name and the first entry of social.links of the configuration file by default. But you can also override it as follows:

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---
author:
  name: Full Name
  link: https://example.com
---

Table of Contents

By default, the Table of Contents (TOC) is displayed on the right panel of the post. If you want to turn it off globally, go to _config.yml and set the value of variable toc to false. If you want to turn off TOC for a specific post, add the following to the post’s Front Matter:

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---
toc: false
---

Comments

The global switch of comments is defined by variable comments.active in the file _config.yml. After selecting a comment system for this variable, comments will be turned on for all posts.

If you want to close the comment for a specific post, add the following to the Front Matter of the post:

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---
comments: false
---

Mathematics

For website performance reasons, the mathematical feature won’t be loaded by default. But it can be enabled by:

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---
math: true
---

Mermaid

Mermaid is a great diagrams generation tool. To enable it on your post, add the following to the YAML block:

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---
mermaid: true
---

Then you can use it like other markdown languages: surround the graph code with ```mermaid and ```.

Images

Caption

Add italics to the next line of an image，then it will become the caption and appear at the bottom of the image:

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![img-description](/path/to/image)
_Image Caption_

Size

In order to prevent the page content layout from shifting when the image is loaded, we should set the width and height for each image:

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![Desktop View](/assets/img/sample/mockup.png){: width="700" height="400" }

Starting from Chirpy v5.0.0, height and width support abbreviations (height → h, width → w). The following example has the same effect as the above:

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![Desktop View](/assets/img/sample/mockup.png){: w="700" h="400" }

Position

By default, the image is centered, but you can specify the position by using one of the classes normal, left, and right.

Once the position is specified, the image caption should not be added.

  • Normal position

    Image will be left aligned in below sample:

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    ![Desktop View](/assets/img/sample/mockup.png){: .normal }

  • Float to the left

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    ![Desktop View](/assets/img/sample/mockup.png){: .left }

  • Float to the right

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    ![Desktop View](/assets/img/sample/mockup.png){: .right }

Shadow

The screenshots of the program window can be considered to show the shadow effect, and the shadow will be visible in the light mode:

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![Desktop View](/assets/img/sample/mockup.png){: .shadow }

CDN URL

If you host the images on the CDN, you can save the time of repeatedly writing the CDN URL by assigning the variable img_cdn of _config.yml file:

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img_cdn: https://cdn.com

Once img_cdn is assigned, the CDN URL will be added to the path of all images (images of site avatar and posts) starting with /.

For instance, when using images:

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![The flower](/path/to/flower.png)

The parsing result will automatically add the CDN prefix https://cdn.com before the image path:

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<img src="https://cdn.com/path/to/flower.png" alt="The flower">

Image Path

When a post contains many images, it will be a time-consuming task to repeatedly define the path of the images. To solve this, we can define this path in the YAML block of the post:

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---
img_path: /img/path/
---

And then, the image source of Markdown can write the file name directly:

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![The flower](flower.png)

The output will be:

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<img src="/img/path/flower.png" alt="The flower">

Preview Image

If you want to add an image to the top of the post contents, specify the attribute src, width, height, and alt for the image:

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---
image:
  src: /path/to/image/file
  width: 1000   # in pixels
  height: 400   # in pixels
  alt: image alternative text
---

Except for alt, all other options are necessary, especially the width and height, which are related to user experience and web page loading performance. The above section “Size” also mentions this.

Starting from Chirpy v5.0.0, the attributes height and width can be abbreviated: height → h, width → w. In addition, the img_path can also be passed to the preview image, that is, when it has been set, the attribute src only needs the image file name.

Pinned Posts

You can pin one or more posts to the top of the home page, and the fixed posts are sorted in reverse order according to their release date. Enable by:

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---
pin: true
---

Prompts

There are three types of prompts, note, warning and danger. When writing, add the class prompt-{type} to a blockquote:

  • Note
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    > Example line for prompt.
{: .prompt-note }
  • Warning
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    > Example line for prompt.
{: .prompt-warning }
  • Danger
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    > Example line for prompt.
{: .prompt-danger }

Syntax

Inline Code 

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`inline code part`

Filepath Hightlight 

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`/path/to/a/file.extend`{: .filepath}

Code Block

Markdown symbols ``` can easily create a code block as follows:

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```
This is a plaintext code snippet.
```

Specifying Language

Using ```{language} you will get a code block with syntax highlight:

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```yaml
key: value
```

Line Number

By default, all languages except plaintext, console, and terminal will display line numbers. When you want to hide the line number of a code block, add the class nolineno to it:

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```shell
echo 'No more line numbers!'
```
{: .nolineno }

Specifying the Filename

You may have noticed that the code language will be displayed at the top of the code block. If you want to replace it with the file name, you can add the attribute file to achieve this:

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```shell
# content
```
{: file="path/to/file" }

Liquid Codes

If you want to display the Liquid snippet, surround the liquid code with and:

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```liquid
{% if product.title contains 'Pack' %}
  This product's title contains the word Pack.
{% endif %}
```

Or adding render_with_liquid: false (Requires Jekyll 4.0 or higher) to the post’s YAML block.

Learn More

For more knowledge about Jekyll posts, visit the Jekyll Docs: Posts.

Blogging, Tutorial
writing
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.
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