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Writing a post

Like any other blog management system, Emanates also supports meta tags, post cover, post description etc. Since Emanates directly doesn't interact with the user, these details are passed through from GitHub Issue itself.

Following is a list of such features built using GitHub Issues:

  • Tags: GitHub Issue labels.
  • Description: Passed in issue body as a comment
  • Cover picture: Passed in issue body as a comment

Post Content#

The post content, as you might have guessed, is the body of the issue when the issue is created. It supports markdown just like GitHub's. Users can also add HTML in the content since it's eventually rendered to HTML itself.

No tricks here, this is just a basic post with markdown content which will be rendered to HTML and showed as the post body.

Tags#

Every post supports tags. Emanates adds support for tags through GitHub Labels. When a post is created, on the right there is an option to add tags. These tags are fetched by Emanates when building the site and are accordingly showed on the post.

info

While adding a label, if it is not already present, go ahead and create a custom one.

Things to note:

  1. The first label in GitHub Issue is used as the type of post. This can be something like Documentation, Guide or anything similar.
  2. All other label are considered as basic tags describing the post. These tags are used to fetch related articles.

Main Label#

This label should describe what the post is doing. If it is a basic Documentation post, if it is a Travel post or such. This will show up as the category the current post is in.

Other labels#

All other labels are tags describing the content of the post. Let's say there's a post about animals and their habitats, so the other labels can contain words like animals, habitat, wildlife etc.

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It is highly advised to add a few (at least 4, excluding the main label) labels describing a post. These tags are used to suggest related posts to users so this goes hand in hand with user experience.

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These tags are also used in meta tags so it's always good to add them to get better SEO

Description#

The description of the post is used when a gist of the post is shown in the index page as well as it's used in Meta tags to improve SEO.

The description needs to passed on as a comment in the post body.

A comment can be added in the following way:

[//]: # (Describe a bit about your post in a line or two)
warning

The description should always be the first comment in the body of the post.

Post Cover#

A cover image can be added to the post by passing it as a comment like description above. It should be an URL to a file that is accesible by the public.

The comment can be added in the following way:

[//]: # (https://link.to/your/image)

This cover image is also added to the meta tags so you might want to keep the size in limit so platforms like Twitter can show the image, else they usually ignore the image if it's too large in size.

warning

The cover image should always be the second comment in the body of the post.