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How to create TGIF

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Gregor Martynus edited this page Sep 19, 2016 · 1 revision

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TGIF, or Thank G-word-goes-here It’s Friday, has been a staple of the Hoodie community since 2013. Many different collaborators have been responsible for this effort, but one thing has remained the same: we’ve always tried to collect the most interesting, informative, and inspirational links from the week and share them with the larger Hoodie community for some Friday (or weekend) reading.

See examples of TGIF here:

The greater portion of the time commitment in this endeavor has always been on the curation—or finding of—the links. With that in mind, here are some tried and trusted methods and resources for fantastic reading:

(Editor’s note: For clarification, the following links are not to be shared in a TGIF post, but are excellent platforms for finding links).

Curation

Good starting points:

Great sites for general reference:

By topic:

Projects we love:
+ API Blueprint / Apiary
+ browserify
+ CouchDB
+ Ember.js
+ GitHub
+ Greenkeeper
+ hapi
+ JSON API
+ PouchDB
+ semantic-release
+ Tessel
+ Your First PR

Friends’ blogs:
+ &yet
+ npm
+ Bocoup
+ ^lift security
+ Travis CI
+ JSConf
+ Mozilla
+ Meetup

Great active community curators on social media:
+ Andy Baio
+ Anil Dash
+ Daniel Eden
+ Deray McKesson
+ Diana Kimball
+ Ijeoma Oluo
+ Karolina Szczur
+ Lena Reinhard
+ Paul Jarvis
+ Una Kravets
+ Zach Holman

Remember that everything we share needs to keep in line with our Code of Conduct, in particular:

We’re attentive in our communications, whether in person or online, and we’re tactful when approaching differing views. We are aware that language shapes reality. Thus, we use inclusive, gender-neutral language in the documents we provide and when we talk to people.

Creating a draft

Once you have at least 3-5 links per section you’ll have enough content to create a draft.

For the Hoodie blog, we utilize Markdown formatting—which will be very important for you to know. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. GitHub provides a Markdown tutorial, and Daring Fireball has a particular thorough resource on Markdown Syntax.

For some, it might be easier to create a first draft using a document writer liker Google Docs, Hackpad, Microsoft Word, Live Writer, etc. before formatting in Markdown.

Once you have a good draft going, then you want to make sure you have it formatted correctly. For examples of the TGIF format see the draft TGIF post in the hood.ie repo, or this recent TGIF markdown file.

Draft formatting

The TGIF post format follows this pattern:

Intro:

Intro text

Or by you, so make sure to put your name in the right spot in the intro, with a corresponding link to where you can be reached on social media (usually Twitter, Google+ or GitHub).

Topic Header

Links to stories:

Links formatting

Pull quotes:

> The fascinating quote goes right here like this behind the little crocodile mouth.

-<cite>Author’s name goes here, [Title of the piece you’re sharing](followed by the link to it)</cite>

You’ll want to try to include at least one pull quote per section.

Embedded media

This includes embedded video and tweets from Twitter, but try to use them sparingly, since the embedded tweets often just appear like pull quotes, which causes a bit of redundancy in appearance.

When embedding media, be sure to delete extraneous scripts or tags, for example, when embedding a tweet, Twitter will give you a glob of code like this:

`

Thank glob it’s Friday! Here’s our weekend reading list, curated just for you by @skeskali Enjoy ❤️https://t.co/xDFRlORotA

— Hoodie (@hoodiehq) June 10, 2016
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>`

In order for the blockquote to play nicely with Markdown, simply remove the code between the script tags at the very end:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Thank glob it’s Friday! Here’s our weekend reading list, curated just for you by <a href="https://twitter.com/skeskali">@skeskali</a> Enjoy ❤️<a href="https://t.co/xDFRlORotA">https://t.co/xDFRlORotA</a></p>&mdash; Hoodie (@hoodiehq) <a href="https://twitter.com/hoodiehq/status/741374209641881600">June 10, 2016</a></blockquote>

Images

Markdown does allow for the sharing of images, just use this format:

Image markdown

Other formatting odds and ends

  • Use (“”, ‘’) smart quotes (or curly quotes), in the place of ("", '') straight quotes since we’re long past the age of the typewriter.
  • Use hyphens (-) to connect terms (e.g., tie-in, toll-free call, two-thirds) and use the en dash (–) when referring to range (e.g., the May–September issue, pages 147–48). Use the em dash (—) like a parentheses, to show interruption in speech (e.g., “I wasn’t trying to imply——” “Then just what were you trying to do?”), or as substitute for something missing. Do not leave spaces between any of the three and their connecting word.
  • Only use one space after a period in a sentence.
  • Avoid using & for and

For other language tips, check out the Hoodie Language Style Guide, and the glossary of common terms—which comes in handy when trying to be consistent with different terms and names for technologies (e.g., is it Node, node, or Node.js? Or node.js?).

Feedback and publication

Feedback
Once you have a draft, and you’ve formatted it with Markdown, you’re ready to get some feedback. Feedback is absolutely essential to everything we do at Hoodie, and that includes TGIF!

There are different platforms where you can request feedback: through GitHub, if you’ve managed to create a pull request for your draft; in the Hoodie Slack (or IRC) in the #general or #editorial channels; via email (you can reach the Editorial Team lead here), or by pinging us on Twitter (@hoodiehq or @jennwrites, our DMs are open ☺️).

Publication
To publish TGIF you’ll want to take your formatted draft and create a pull request (PR). If you’re unfamiliar, GitHub has an awesome tutorial on learning the GitHub workflow.

We have also documented the process for creating a blog post (TGIF posts live on the Hoodie blog) so you can find instructions there as well.

However, it’s also possible to create a PR right from the browser, as demonstrated below.

Creating and updating TGIF draft

You can create and update a TGIF blog post draft directly on github.com by only using your browser. No need to install anything or use the terminal.

Step 1: create a new file

Click on _posts

On the hoodiehq/hood.ie repository page, click on the _posts folder

create new file

Then click on the create new file button

Step 2: Set a filename and copy paste the draft content

set file name

Set the filename to something like 2016-06-10-TBD-tgif-88.md, instead of 2016-06-10 use the date of the upcoming Friday for the TGIF, and instead of 88 set the number of the next TGIF (You can find out the last used number on the Hoodie blog.

Then copy the contents of the empty TGIF post template and paste it into the big text area below

Step 3: Create a commit for your draft

Commit message and branch

Scroll to the bottom of the page. In the text field below Commit changes, enter TGIF 88 draft (replace 88 with the current number). In the options below, select the 2nd option (Create a new branch for this commit and start a pull request), and enter tgif-88 (replace 88 with the current number) into the text input next to it.

Step 4: Start the pull request

Pull request preview

You will see the preview of the pull request. Click on the big green Create pull request button.

The draft has now been created and a pull request was started :)

Step 4: Edit the draft

Edit draft

Open the Files changes tab and click on the small pen icon

Create update commit

It looks just like when you created a new file. You can now make all the changes you want. When you are done, scroll to the bottom of the page, enter a commit message (format doesn’t matter, simply describe your changes) and click the big green Commit changes button

That’s pretty much it. Repeat step 4 until you are ready. In the edit view you can also change the name from 2016-06-10-TBD-tgif-88.md to what the final URL should be. Replace the TBD with the words used in the TGIF title, all lowercase, separated with dashes (e.g. if the title is LAPTOP MENTORING CLOUDS APP BOOM: TGIF (88), then the file name is 2016-06-10-laptop-mentoring-clouds-app-boom-tgif-88.md)

Preview

Preview

To preview the current version of the draft by clicking on the Files changed tab, and then on the View button.

Going “live” on the blog
You will need the approval of two Hoodie contributors in order to publish to the blog. This approval happens by receiving two “LGTM” (or, “looks good to me”) comments on a PR.

Once approved, and merged, by the powers of Jekyll your post will go live on the Hoodie blog.

But wait—there’s just one more step! The final part of publication is sharing TGIF with the greater Hoodie community, via tweeting it out from the Hoodie Twitter. You can coordinate that through the #editorial channel in Slack.

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