The Code for DC blog is open for contributions for the community. Here's how you do it:
Before you start, you may want to run your idea by Matt to make sure that it is a good fit for the blog.
If you haven't already, go to the site's repo and make your own fork. This is your personal copy to do as you wish, and nothing will affect the public site until your changes are merged into the original repo (see below).
In a Jekyll site like Code for DC's, blog posts live in the blog folder. There are two folders there: _drafts and _posts. If you were working on a live version of the site, you'd use the _drafts folder to hide your post until it was ready, but since you're on a separate fork you should just work in _posts.
Create a new file in _posts, with the name yyyy-mm-dd-your-post-title. You can use either the .md or .html file extension, depending on how you want to write your post.
You should also choose an avatar for yourself, and add that to the images/blog/avatars folder.
Certain things, like the title, author info, and post time, are set in what's called the YAML front matter at the top of the post. It looks something like this:
---
layout: post
title: "Your Blog Post Title"
post_author: "Your Name"
post_avatar: "your-avatar.jpg"
date: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
categories: blog
post_twitter: "@your-twitter" #optional
image: "image.jpg" #optional
description: "A very brief summary of the post" #optional
---
For the date field, choose the date that you'd want your post to go up. If you don't have a preference, just put the current date. Make sure that it matches the date in your filename.
Then, you just need to type up the body of your post. If you'd prefer to set an excerpt for the main page other than the first 50 words, pop a <!--more--> tag in where the excerpt should cut off.
Once you've committed your post to your fork of the repo, run jekyll and check that everything looks good:
jekyll serve --watch --future
Point your browser to localhost:4000/blog to see your handiwork. When you're ready, open a pull request from your fork to the Code for DC repo. We'll review the post and, if everything is good to go, we'll merge it in and you're done!