Chymeric Tutorials is an open source publishing website. We are all about meeting our awesome readership’s demand for awesome content in an awesome package:

• What: We host a regularly updated resource of thorough and reliable how-to, research, and documentation articles. Please view our tag cloud to see what topics we write about, and browse by your areas of interest.

• How: We keep our content neatly organized (completely separate from all design elements), and seamlessly accessible - so that anybody can easily archive, contribute to, or reproduce our publishing efforts. Read more about the fantastic features of our super-minimal publishing concept below!

Features for Readers

Our publishing approach provides many exciting features for the average awesome reader - as well as for editors, bloggers, and archivists interested in our content.

Evergreen Content

We value the quality and usefulness of our content, and as such keep all pages up-to-date for as long as this is feasible given their respective topics. Landed on a page authored over one year ago? Great! You can be sure it also covers any significant developments that may have occurred in the mean time.

Version Control

As our pages get updated over time, we also provide the opportunity to browse our articles’ histories: Our entire editing history is published on GitHub under this repository. For ease of reference, all our pages contain a link to the GitHub location of their respective files - the link is located in the footer of each page and formatted as follows:

Authored by Horea Christian • 2014-11-01 00:17 • full history here • education, journalism, science

Thanks to our thorough content tracking, those interested in referencing our work have both the option of linking to our website (which always shows the latest content) or to a specific revision on GitHub. The former would provide an up-to-date reference, while the latter would make sure that reference link content remains exactly the same. Neat - huh?

Robustness

A pleasant consequence of GitHub versioning is that our content also remains online regardless of any potential crashes of our servers. If our website is ever down - and you need our content ASAP - you can find it on our GitHub repository. Further, we use Git beyond the scope of just GitHub. Our content is thus backed up on a multitude of our machines; and in fact you can also easily copy it yourself!

Reproducibility

Our Website is built entirely on a default Octopress distribution - and we only version the files which are different from that (meaning content and some odd bits of chrome). As such it is very easy to just copy our repository content over an Octopress install and mirror our entire site. We have put together a quick but comprehensive set of instructions for reproducing our website on our repository README.

Features for Contributors

Chymeric Tutorials greatly values open collaboration and multi-authorship - and we have designed our website just so that you can best modify its content. If you are interested in contributing, we took great care to make this as easy as possible while still providing a maximum of transparency and adequate proof-of-authorship.

Fork and Write!

Every article contains a link to its GitHub page at the very end. You can follow any of these links to our GitHub repository, which you can fork.

GitHub provides a nice visual interface for editing (automatically taking care of prerequisites such as forking). To get started you just need to make sure you are already registered on GitHub (free and spam-less!). After you have an account, the Edit buttons on the upper right of all our article pages will become active and you can start editing from a pretty and convenient point-and-click visual interface. Alternatively you can also manually fork and clone our repository and edit it locally with your favourite Markdown editor. Don’t forget to add yourself under the author: section after you have edited the file!

Submit Pull Requests!

If you are satisfied with your work and would like to see it published on our blog (along with recognition of your authorship) you may use the convenient GitHub Pull Request button to ask us to publish your work. This will create a “pull request” page, where we can discuss how to best merge your file into ours.

Also, before submitting a pull request, please make sure you have formatted your work somewhat according to our writing standards. A brief rundown:

• Octopress-flavored kramdown syntax (as seen in any and all of our own posts)

• Each phrase or “block of meaning” on a separate line (also as seen in any and all of our own posts)