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MCS CAT Blog

What is the purpose of this blog?

The Microsoft Copilot Studio (MCS) Customer Advisory Team (CAT) Blog is intended to be a technical notebook for sharing quick, practical patterns and snippets that are useful in customer scenarios but don’t fit into formal documentation or guidance. The public site is https://microsoft.github.io/mcscatblog/.

More specifically, this blog is meant to be:

  • Fast - A public self-controlled platform where contributors can post without waiting for approvals or adhering to external publishing cadences.
  • Semi-formal - A place for semi-formal content like technical samples, workarounds, and implementation notes—that are too specific or low-level for official guidance.
  • Collaborative - A collaborative space where anyone can contribute, with the idea that mature patterns might eventually flow into formal documentation or guidance.
  • Connected - A way to amplify original content, such as personal videos or LinkedIn posts, provided the contributor adds meaningful value and doesn’t simply echo existing material.

This blog should not be used to compensate for missing or inaccurate documentation. Contributors should avoid cannibalizing formal guidance by clearly distinguishing between temporary specific patterns and stable high-level recommendations.

What to post?

  • How to use a specific combination of features in a specific use case
  • Commentary on specific business use cases or agent approaches
  • Point-in-time workarounds until a feature is released
  • Detailed steps or updates to documentation that help resolve issues

What not to post?

  • General feature usage guides
  • High-level guidance that belongs in formal documentation
  • Content that compensates for missing or inaccurate documentation (fix the docs instead)

What are the guidelines for contributing to the blog?

The blog is hosted on GitHub Pages under https://microsoft.github.io/mcscatblog/. It uses Jekyll for static site generation and Chirpy as the theme.

How to contribute:

  1. Join the repo: Share your GitHub username with Adi to be added as a contributor.
  2. Clone the repo and create a new branch.
  3. Write your post in Markdown (.md) format under the _posts folder.
    • Follow naming conventions: include the date and post name.
    • Include metadata (front matter): title, date, categories, tags, author info.
    • You can embed images, videos, and other static files.
  4. Test locally using: bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload --baseurl /mcscatblog.
  5. Submit a pull request and notify Adi for merging.

Authoring tips

  • Use https://chirpy.cotes.page/posts/write-a-new-post/ for formatting and embedding media.
  • You can link your author profile to social accounts like Twitter/X, LinkedIn.
  • GitHub Copilot (especially with the Opus model) can assist with writing posts, but it may miss some conventions, so review the guide manually.

Learn about writing new posts in Chirpy: Writing a New Post

Chirpy Theme Info

Gem Version  GitHub license

When installing the Chirpy theme through RubyGems.org, Jekyll can only read files in the folders _data, _layouts, _includes, _sass and assets, as well as a small part of options of the _config.yml file from the theme's gem. If you have ever installed this theme gem, you can use the command bundle info --path jekyll-theme-chirpy to locate these files.

The Jekyll team claims that this is to leave the ball in the user’s court, but this also results in users not being able to enjoy the out-of-the-box experience when using feature-rich themes.

To fully use all the features of Chirpy, you need to copy the other critical files from the theme's gem to your Jekyll site. The following is a list of targets:

.
├── _config.yml
├── _plugins
├── _tabs
└── index.html

To save you time, and also in case you lose some files while copying, we extract those files/configurations of the latest version of the Chirpy theme and the CD workflow to here, so that you can start writing in minutes.

Usage

Check out the theme's docs.

Contributing

This repository is automatically updated with new releases from the theme repository. If you encounter any issues or want to contribute to its improvement, please visit the theme repository to provide feedback.

License

This work is published under MIT License.

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