Overview:

If you do not already have a local copy of your repository on your computer you must clone it to your computer.

Clone your repository

1. Copy the URL

Navigate to your repository on your browser, click “Clone or Download” and copy the url.

2. Clone in Terminal

Next, navigate to terminal, move to the directory where you want to place your repository, and run the command git clone to clone the repository. Then navigate to that directory using the cd command and check to see if everything is in the repo using the ls command.

Now that your repository is cloned locally you can create your first post!

Open up your favorite Markdown editor. I personally use Markdown Plus because you can get a preview of how your code looks as you are writing it. This app does cost money, however, a good free alternative is Atom.

1. Make a new post

In the toolbar, click “New” to create a new document. This will open a window where you can save your new post. Save the document in the “_posts” directory within your repository with the naming convention “yyyy-mm-dd-title-with-hyphens-replacing-spaces”.

2. Format the post

Now that you’ve created a new post, you have to tell your Markdown editor what kind of post it is. You do this by creating a header. For example:

---
layout: post
title: Acropora Larvae DNA/RNA Extraction Batch 3
tags: [DNA, RNA, eggs, sperm]
---

Once that is done you are good to go! Remember to save often.

Push your changes to GitHub!

1. Check the status of your repository

Navigate back to terminal and check the status of your repository using the command git status. You may have to pull to update the local version of your repository before you upload your changes using the git pull command. Pulling is especially important when you are working with other collaborators on the same repository.

2. Add your changes to the stage

When you see that it’s ok to push, add your changes. You can do this in a few ways:

add -A will add all of the changes that you’ve made since you last pushed
add <path_to_file> will add just the file that you specify
add path_to_file/some-day* will add all of the posts with that day in the title

3. Commit your changes with a message

Now you have to commit your changes. In terminal, type the command commit -m and in quotation marks say what changes you made. For example: commit -m "created post Hello World!"

4. Push to GitHub

Finally, push your changes with the command git push. If you get an error saying you need authorization, push again and this should prompt you to enter your user name and password.

That’s it! You’re on your way!

Resource for embedding videos into Markdown: Video to Markdown