Here it is a how-to for contributing to the ustwo recipe book.
Chances are that you want to publish a recipe that you have not invented yourself. Big chef or small blog, please give credit where credit is due.
This includes images as well, by the way. If you don't have the time to shoot a proper picture don't just grab the first one that appears in Google Images. For example, in Flickr you can search for pictures with Creative Commons licenses only, use those. Hot-linking is not considered good etiquette either, so please download the image and add it to the images folder (see below).
Markdown is simple enough that can be edited by hand on any text editor. However, if you prefer a little bit of help, you can use Mou a very simple editor for Mac (please get in touch if you have recommendations for good editors for Windows and Linux).
If you need some help with the syntax keep either John Gruber's or Github's cheat-sheets at hand.
Worst case scenario just write the recipe in plain text and ask one of the developers for help.
As mentioned above, do not hot-link images from other websites, download them to the images folder instead. Give them a meaningul name, ideally related to the recipe and then embed them in your recipe like this:
Remember to add a mention in the acknowledgments section.
We are only offering these sections as a rule of thumb, feel free to skip some if they don't make sense for your recipe.
For the title use a single "#" (it should be the only one in the document) and for the rest of the section headers use "##".
- Title. Should be obvious!
- Intro. What makes the recipe important for you, do you eat it hungover on Saturday mornings? Is there a nice restaurant where they nail it? Everyone loves a good story (they can skip it if they do not).
- Ingredients. Add them one by one using a list. It's important to mention roughly how many servings they produce.
- How to do it. Go step by step, the level of granularity is up to you.
- Tips and tricks. Does it freeze well? If so, how do you defrost it? Anything special with the ingredients? Can hard to find ingredients be substituted by something else without affecting the end result too much?
- Related. Other recipes that go along well? Can you spin off other recipes with the leftovers?
- Allergies and dietary requirements. Vegeterian, vegan, nuts free, gluten free… Use a list, one entry per item.
- Acknowledgments. Add links to the original author, to whoever took the picture you are using or simply pay compliments to your mum.
If you are a developer just fork and send a pull request per recipe, you know the drill : )
First of all, kudos for at least trying!
If you are worried about breaking things, don't be. Yes, you can break things, but if for some reason you have managed to do BAD THINGS we can always revert your changes.
Now for beef!
- Create an account at Github. Ask Juan, Victor or Gianpi to add you to the repository.
- Install a GIT client, for example Github's (Mac, Windows).
- Launch it and, when asked, install the command line tools. Login with the user you create on the first step.
- If everything went ok, under GITHUB.COM you should see an ustwo icon. Click it and on the right hand side select
recipe-book. Click it and select where you do you want to clone it (that means downloading it). - When done, click on the repository name which should now appear at the top under
Cloned Repositories.
At this point you can have a click around through the sections. You can safely ignore Branches and Settings, let's have a look at the others.
History gives you an indication of who's done what and when. When you click one of the commits (group of changes), on the right hand side you see what that change was about. Sometimes is adding new files (recipes), sometimes just fixing types, etc.
This where you can create your own commits, ie, adding a new recipe. If you have not created your recipe by now, do it.
Create an empty file with the recipe name. Use the name of the recipe as the file name (English characters only, replace spaces with "_") and .md as the extension.
If you go back to the Changes section the icon should be coloured now and the new file should appear there, selected and marked as "new".
Go now and write down your lovely recipe. Once you are done go back to the Changes section, it's time for your first commit!
Add a summary and an extendend description if you feel like it. For example:
Good
Summary: Adding the first version of my potato salad, yay!
Extended description: Boy, that took a while, but I'm so happy I now know my way around Github : )
Bad
Summary: change
Extended description:
So be a sport and add nice summary and description. Feeling creative? Emojis to the rescue.
Too many emojis make developers 😢
So, almost there. You have selected your files, added a summary and a description of your changes, now press the Commit button. You commit (change) should appear now under Unsynced Commits.
Last step: press the Sync button… et voila! You have published your first recipe!