How to use the MCT Blog ‐ Author's Page - MCT-master/guides GitHub Wiki

Create your own page

If you open any post on the MCT Blog you will notice that is possible to click on most author's name. This will lead you to a page that includes all works produced by the specific author. It is possible to access the same page clicking on the name listed in the About page, which are organized by intake and by affiliated institution. The author pages are static and can be accessed by a unique URL. You can use your author's page as your personal MCT portfolio (they will not be deleted after graduation).

We integrated in the MCT Blog code that identifies unique authors and consolidate the work they produced in a list of posts (accessible via hyperlink). However, the author page will not appear automatically as soon as you create a post with your name. The author page has to be created manually following these steps.

Open the blog repository in VS Code selecting File -> Open Folder... and select the folder mct-master.github.io in the dialog window.
In the Explorer panel right click on the folder _authors and select New File. The file should be named as your first name followed by your last name .md (no spaces, no hyphens, no capital letters) such as firstnamelastname.md. This will generate your author page at the address https://mct-master.github.io/authors/firstnamelastname.html.
Add the following text to the file you just created
```
---
name: Firstname Lastname
exclude: space separated list of post titles to be excluded
---
```
The list of works included in the author page includes only published blog posts in which one of the author exactly matches Firstname Lastname (case sensitive). Therefore you should be very consistent with your author name in all your blog posts. Do not use abbreviations, first or last name only, do not swap the order of first and last name, do not include middle names, make sure the first letter is Capital and the rest are small. Also, when posts have multiple authors, make sure that the names are separated by comma such as Firstname1 Lastname1, Firstname2 Lastname2, Firstname3 Lastname3. Do not use "&" or "and" to separate the last author in the list. For simplicity, we recommend using only two words for author's names (one word for the first and one word for the last). However if you think that this is not sufficiently representative of your own name, you can use three or more separated words. Moreover, the exclude field allows to specify one or more post that you wish to exclude from this page. For example if your with to exclude two posts which title are My first post and My second post, you can set the exclude field as My first post My second post, i.e. a space-separated list o of the title of the posts you wish to exclude (no comma, do double quote, no hyphens).
Edit the about.md file in the root folder of the repository, find your name and add to it an hyperlink to it using the following Markdown code
```
[Firstname Lastname](/authors/firstnamelastname.html)
```
Generate a local copy of the MCT blog statically generated using Jekyll (following Step 3.3 of this guide) and verify that your author page opens correctly when clicking on your name on a published blog post (right below the title), and also when clicking on your name in the About page. Since this is a local copy of the blog, the author page will show at http://127.0.0.1:4000/authors/firstnamelastname.html instead of https://mct-master.github.io/authors/firstnamelastname.html.
Commit and push the changes to the MCT Blog online repository.

Customize your own page

You can customize your author page by editing the firstnamelastname.md you created in the _authors folder. You can add anything below the “---” such as text and multimedia, as you do in any other blog post. Anything you add (your personal profile, a bio, a picture, links to external sites, etc.) will show between the page title (i.e. your name) and the list of hyperlinks to your posts. For more details on editing the page and adding embedding multimedia files you can refer to guides Creating a Blog Post and Embedding and Storage of Files.

< Back to "How to use the MCT Blog"