Märzwasser helps you organize your writing, co-author literary texts, and make your work open, free, and accessible. Here’s how You can become a part of the “Collaborative Literature Framework”.

If you have any issues at all with following the instructions below, please tell us via our issue tracking system - you’ll have to register on GitHub for this (which is easy, fast, free, and will not spam your inbox). Once you tell us your issue we will start helping you immediately!

Contribute New Texts

If you have a literary creation which you would like to publicize via our website - and are enthusiastic about potential contributions from other authors - you can easily make your texts a part of Märzwasser. For this you should follow these simple steps:

1. Create a GitHub account here.
2. Sign in to your GitHub account.
3. Fork our main repository - via the GitHub “fork” button in the upper right.
4. Navigate to mw/source/_posts in the repository fork you now have on your account (by clicking on the folders).
5. Create a new empty file in that location (via the “create a new file here” button - it’s located right after the directory path).
6. Rename your file and add content to it based on the markdown syntax examples seen in any other files in that directory.
7. Submit a pull request via the respective button in your GitHub interface.

Every new file should contain a preamble which looks like this:

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---
layout: post
title: "Lorem"
date: 2013-12-28 17:49:17 +0200
comments: true
categories: [fiction, non-fiction, horror, fantasy, whatever]
author: <a rel="author" href="http://your.website.org">A. U. Thor</a>
license: <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.
---

The date should indicate when you wrote the text; and layout: post and comments: true should generally remain unchanged. We also encourage you to keep the license: field unchanged as exemplified above - though we further detail licensing on our “about” page.

Make an Edit

If you feel you can in any way improve the work of another author and would like to contribute to his text - you should follow these steps (very similar to the above):

1. Create a GitHub account here.
2. Sign in to your GitHub account.
3. Fork our main repository - via the GitHub “fork” button in the upper right.
4. Navigate to mw/source/_posts in the repository fork you now have on your account (by clicking on the folders).
5. Find the file you want to edit and make the edits you want.
6. Submit a pull request via the respective button in your GitHub interface.

When you contribute to a text you should add yourself (if you are not already on the list) to the list of authors in the preamble - example: author: "A. U. Thor, Contribu Tor, Your Name". You should not edit the license unless you have verified that there is a consensus about your proposed license change among all other authors of the work.

For the Hackers among You

If you are familiar with Git, GitHub, and Octopress (and feel comfortable hacking stuff here and there) you may do the following instead:

1. Install Octopress as described here.
2. Optionally: Install Königspress, our Octopress theme of choice.
3. Copy the files from our main repository on top of your Octopress install.
4. Prune and select the files tracked in git (via git rm --cached and git add respectively) to include only and all of the locations we include.

This will actually give you a working copy of our website! You may now push to and pull from our repository, edit, and even mirror our content as you like.

^{Browse the history of this file or find static versions to cite via its GitHub page!}