Overview

Prose.io is a web app that allows the user to access there github content. In other words prose is “a content editor for GitHub”.

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Prose is very similar to the visual editor included in older versions of WordPress that many people have used for writing blog posts. The offical documentation is here.

NOTE: One thing prose does really well is it the user the ability to update their own github websites, especially those who don’t have the time and energy to learn how to write code. While there is plenty of great technical resources for working with Prose on GitHub, there is very little documentation for people who don’t code. Here are some of the key aspects of prose that I use as a researcher.

Prose.io

Prose allows simple draft post creation for github (and jekyll) through a web app/interface for simple markdown. Markdown is very easy to learn as it is ment to be read as plain text as well as rendered as a document like word or html. See my early post for some basics

Prose for jekyll blogs

I really just use it to enter the text and ideas for blogs. It makes it easier to sit in a cafe and write an idea down that then can be included as a blog post or documentation for a project I am working on. I like using it at the moment because I have been able to test the effectiveness of my markdown code to render the posts and information I use regularly in R. A couple of key points that make prose good:

  1. Makes automatic commit lines when you save

  2. Shortcut for saving in windows ctrl s works as a automatic commit making it easy to update draft after you have made comments

  3. Easy for short passages of text == good for a blog

  4. Uses markdown which results in much easier inclusion in other markdown flavours such as RMarkdown

Maybe in the future this will be a good tool to get simple ideas from the notepad to the publication level quicker?

Prose workflow

Here is a simple step-by-step guide to editting blogs using github and prose online.

  1. Open web browser and navigate to: https://prose.io/

  2. Authenticate your github account associated with the blog site you want to work on.

  3. Navigate to the repository where your blog is kept.

  4. Generate a new post. NOTE: this will be saved in the _drafts folder until published.

This is a nice quick way to generate a new blog template and file.

Side flows :)

  • For editing old posts navigate to the ./_posts/ folder of your blogs repository.