Posting to GitHub

We use a platform called GitHub to submit and review our work because it’s an example of a powerful way for different people to collaborate on digital history projects.

Writing on GitHub

Write in Markdown

All work must be appropriately formatted in Markdown to use bold, italics, bullets, and so on. If you are new to Markdown, complete this Markdown tutorial. If you need syntax help, check out this cheat sheet.

Writing somewhere else

If you write on the GitHub website (or anywhere online), it’s not super convenient to save your work in progress (you can, but you have to click a few times to start editing again). Also, if you lose your internet connection while writing, you might lose your work. Also, you can’t see how your Markdown will render as you write it. There are two few easy options to avoid these issues:

Dillinger

If you want to write online and preview your Markdown text as you write, use Dillinger. It saves your work as you go. When you are done writing, you can get your post into GitHub in two ways:

One is as described above (Writing on GitHub), but you’ll simply copy and paste your text from Dillinger into the edit window on GitHub.

Or, you can:

You can also write your text offline in a text editor. This way, you can more easily compose your assignment over a period of time, save it to your computer, and you will always have your own copy of your work. I recommend that you download and use the free text editor Atom. You can also preview your Markdown as you write through the menu Packages->Markdown Preview->Toggle Preview.

When you are ready to post it on GitHub, save your file with an appropriate name (and .md extension), navigate on GitHub to the appropriate folder, and drag and drop your file.