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Forking this garden

Follow the next steps.

Download the repository⚑

On your terminal, clone this repository with:

git clone https://github.com/lyz-code/blue-book.git

I recommend against forking the repository via Github. If you do that, you'll have all the history of my repository, which will make your repository more heavy than it should (as I have a lot of images), and it will make it hard for me to make pull requests to your digital garden.

Furthermore, you'll always see a message in your repo similar to This branch is 909 commits ahead, 1030 commits behind lyz-code:master. like you can see in this fork. Also if you don't want to keep all the content I've made so far and want to start from scratch then the only thing that is useful for you is the skeleton I've made, and I don't need any attribution or credit for that :P.

If on the other hand you do want to keep all my content, then wouldn't it be better to just make contributions to this repository instead?

Therefore the best way to give credit and attribution is by building your garden (the more we are writing the merrier :) ), and then if you want to spread the word that my garden exists within your content then that would be awesome.

If you end up building your own, remember to add yourself to the digital garden's list.

Adaptations⚑

Project name and repository URL⚑

There are several files that contain references to this repository's name and URL, which is different to the new forked repository URL, since the user name and the repository name might have changed. As of now, the files where you should replace the references are:

  • README.md
  • mkdocs.yml
  • theme/main.html

Blue book is the name of my personal digital garden, try to find a different name for your project that is meaningful to you.

Documents and structure⚑

You can either use the documents of this wiki and extend them, or change the structure by editing the nav section of the mkdocs.yml file. If you want to start from scratch, remove everything on the docs directory.

If you're worried about giving credit to the blue-book then you can link each section of a document from wherever you took the information, or add a link to the bottom of the documents under a References section. Take for example the Python snippets document, each section has a link to where I took the info from. You could do the same on the articles you got from my book by linking to them.

Remove the newsletter feature⚑

The newsletter feature allows your readers to keep updated on the changes of your garden. If you don't want them:

  • Remove the plugin mkdocs-newsletter from the requirements.in and mkdocs.yaml files.
  • Remove the references both to header and footer. To do that, undo the steps described here.

  • Remove the cron configuration of the .github/workflows/gh-pages.yml pipeline:

    schedule:
    - cron: 11 06 * * *

Dependencies⚑

In order to be able to build your site, some Python dependencies are needed. You can install them by running

make update

Checking how it looks⚑

First, clean the old generated site with

make clean

Then, you can preview the site on your local machine by running

make

and then opening the link in your web browser.

Set up the Github repository⚑

On GitHub create a new repository by clicking on the + symbol on the top right and then New Repository.

Removing the old commits⚑

The mkdocs-newsletter plugin uses the commit history to generate the newsletter articles, so if you want to start the newsletter from scratch, a way of doing so is removing the commit history.

A way of doing so is removing the .git folder and re-initializing the repository. Within the repository directory do

rm -rf .git
git init
git remote add origin git@github.com:your_username/your_project_name.git
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git push --set-upstream origin master

Remember to change your_username and your_project_name to your real values.

Setting up GitHub Pages⚑

To enable the Github Pages website associated with your repo, follow these steps:

Now, the site will be built whenever you push new commits and periodically, according to the cron configuration from .github/workflows/gh-pages.yml.