StoryKit Author Documentation

This is the documentation home for authors writing content on this site. It covers everything you need to create posts — from plain Markdown articles to interactive visual essays with zoomable images, maps, video, and text-driven interactions.

New here? Start with the Authors Guide — it walks you through creating, previewing, and publishing your first post entirely from GitHub’s web interface. If you are brand new to GitHub and Markdown as well, the Authoring a Visual Narrative tutorial assumes no prior experience at all and takes you from creating a GitHub account to publishing a first essay.

Finding Your Way

The guides are organized in the order most authors need them:

Getting Started

Tools

The StoryKit Editor (beta) is a browser-based Markdown editor for StoryKit posts: live preview, viewer-tag autocomplete, drag-and-drop media, and GitHub sync — a shared authoring application for all starter sites. One central editor serves every StoryKit repo: sign in with GitHub when ready to sync, then choose a writable repository. Editing and exporting work without login.

Viewers

Viewers are the interactive elements you add to a post with a simple include tag. The Viewers Overview lists them all at a glance; each then has its own reference page:

Interaction and Layout

When Something Goes Wrong

The Troubleshooting Guide covers the most common problems — a viewer that shows nothing, an action link that does nothing, images that don’t update — and how to fix them.

Who This Is For

Most content authors do not need to understand HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

If you are comfortable writing basic Markdown and copying small snippets of example code, you have all the technical background required. The examples in these guides are meant to be copied directly into your own posts and adapted.

How to Use This Documentation

1. Read the Authors Guide and set up the editor.
2. Browse the viewer guides and copy the examples that fit your story.
3. Modify the parameters (image paths, captions, IDs, etc.) to fit your content.
4. If something doesn’t work, check the Troubleshooting Guide.

About the Underlying Theme

This site is built on the Chirpy Jekyll theme. Chirpy provides the publishing engine — layouts, navigation, typography, tags, and categories — and StoryKit adds the interactive storytelling layer on top. For theme-level topics not covered here (site configuration, favicons, advanced typography), see the official Chirpy documentation.

All Guides