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Adding new posts in AstroPaper theme

Posted on:September 23, 2022 at 03:22 PM

Here are some rules/recommendations, tips & ticks for creating new posts in AstroPaper blog theme.

Table of contents

Open Table of contents

Frontmatter

Frontmatter is the main place to store some important information about the post (article). Frontmatter lies at the top of the article and is written in YAML format. Read more about frontmatter and its usage in astro documentation.

Here is the list of frontmatter property for each post.

PropertyDescriptionRemark
titleTitle of the post. (h1)required*
descriptionDescription of the post. Used in post excerpt and site description of the post.default = SITE.desc
authorAuthor of the post.default = SITE.author
datetimePublished datetime in ISO 8601 format.
slugSlug for the post. Usually the all lowercase title seperated in - instead of whtiespacedefault = slugified title
featuredWhether or not display this post in featured section of home pagedefault = false
draftMark this post ‘unpublished’.default = false
tagsRelated keywords for this post. Written in array yaml format.
ogImageOG image of the post. Useful for social media sharing and SEO.default = SITE.ogImage

title and slug fields in frontmatter must be specified.

Title is the title of the post and it is very important for search engine optimization (SEO).

slug is the unique identifier of the url. Thus, slug must be unique and different from other posts. The whitespace of slug needs to be separated with - or _ but - is recommended. If slug is not specified, the slugified title of the post will be used as slug.

Here is the sample frontmatter for the post.

# src/contents/sample-post.md
---
title: The title of the post
author: your name
datetime: 2022-09-21T05:17:19Z
slug: the-title-of-the-post
featured: true
draft: false
tags:
  - some
  - example
  - tags
ogImage: ""
description: This is the example description of the example post.
---

Adding table of contents

By default, a post (article) does not include any table of contents (toc). To include toc, you have to specify it in a specific way.

Write Table of contents in h2 format (## in markdown) and place it where you want it to be appeared on the post.

For instance, if you want to place your table of contents just under the intro paragraph (like I usually do), you can do that in the following way.

---
# some frontmatter
---

Here are some recommendations, tips & ticks for creating new posts in AstroPaper blog theme.

## Table of contents

<!-- the rest of the post -->

Headings

There’s one thing to note about headings. The AstroPaper blog posts use title (title in the frontmatter) as the main heading of the post. Therefore, the rest of the heading in the post should be using h2 ~ h6.

This rule is not mandatory, but highly recommended for visual, accessibility and SEO purposes.

Bonus

Image compression

When you put images in the blog post, it is recommended that the image is compressed. This will affect the overall performance of the website.

My recommendation for image compression sites.

OG Image

The default OG image will be placed if a post does not specify the OG image. Though not required, OG image related to the post should be specify in the frontmatter. The recommended size for OG image is 1200 X 640 px.