I went to make a post on my main blog, and found there were errors, and had a look at what’s changed on the dependency versions page, and I see everything’s been upgrade, and Jekyll 2 support is available!

This post is half a test to see if a simple post works or not, and half a notice there will (and may need to be) updates to Dr. Henry to support the new platform.

Looks like the only issue was with a stray quote mark that the new Jekyll didn’t like… the develop branch has the fix, and I’ll be revitting things shortly to take advantage of the new features we can take advantage of!

@jhohertz

Fixes and a new feature

I have tagged v0.1.1 of Dr. Henry. As a side note, it looks like the tag for v0.1.0 never made it out, though master had the right HEAD ref. Anyways, that’s fixed too.

The main thing worth it for this release is two different fixes to social.

• facebook sharing area hung a few pixels lower than the rest, that has been corrected
• the URL being given to the social widgets wasn’t always right. A canonical URL is provided uniformly now for page widgets. There may be ‘site’ widgets to come that always point to a homepage or the like, but they are not here yet.

There were also a couple of fixes to the navigation in the octo theme.

And the new feature, is there is now a layout for doing slide decks in HTML5 markup based on the fancy reveal.js.

Read on to learn more about that, and the next area of focus.

Core is beginning to become stable.

I am happy to announce v0.1.0 of Dr. Henry. There have been many changes in this release, but the core structure of things is now at the intersection of where I want it, and what is possible within the current limits of GitHub Pages, and should stop being a moving target for anyone wanting to actually make use of it.

Read on to learn more about the features of the release.

The guide below originally comes from Jekyll Bootstrap, and has been updated to reflect the changes in Dr. Henry where there are differences, and provides some background on some things the original did not. It’s not actually about Dr. Henry, but since it is implemented in Jekyll, this is a useful tutorial if you are new to Jekyll. In a couple of cases it will note some areas where Dr. Henry works differently than what would otherwise be typical Jekyll use.

If you just want to post with an existing theme, give this all a skim and focus on the sections about posts and configurations.

And so we begin…

This Jekyll introduction will outline specifically what Jekyll is and why you would want to use it. Directly following the intro we’ll learn exactly how Jekyll does what it does.

Minor release, less confusing theme configuration

Themes are now completely controled by the _data/themes.yml file. This combines the per-theme files in v0.0.1 and adds dependency information. The setup include now calculates the dependency information so it does not need to be explicitly declared.

Just set the theme you want as the depends to the “local” theme, to set which theme you want. (And setup your overrides as you make them.)

Read on if you care about the nitty gritty details, or ignore them if you don’t.

The first release

So what is in this first release?

Starting with a Jekyll Bootstrap fork, theme includes were refactored and a per-fragment theme include mechanism was added. This lets themes load in layers and fall back on fragments down. I started here, as this project shared my goal to publish directly to the GitHub Pages environment.

A core theme provides the guiding structure, and themes will override what they need to get the job done. Base themes build on that, providing popular framework items. Bootstrap 2 and 3, and Foundation 5 are included. On top of all these, themes you actually use, include “octo”, a conversion of the Octopress 2.0 “classic” theme, “jekb”, a conversion of Jekyll Bootstrap look as a simple header change with added CSS on top of the vanilla bootstrap3 base theme. Lastly, OctoFound, a Foundation 5 theme for Octopress, was converted as the example for a theme build on top of the vanilla foundation5 theme.

Blogging works like any other Jekyll install really, no attempt at category structure has been made yet, just a blog, and a home page that emulates the first page of the blog archives for the first 10 posts (by default).

But via setting the right theme settings (which will be simplified soon), you can switch between any of the 3 main themes, and the 3 base themes. There’s a little variation on how each presents, but for the most part offer a blog with a few index pages for looking around by tags, etc.

There’s a lot of rough edges, and it’s still a moving target, but this stable release should be useable for basic blogging, and with some customization, maybe more.

Introduction

This introduction to Dr. Henry will explain what it is, where it comes from, and what it aims to be. Much inspiration (and code) comes from other projects, credited in the features and credits section below.

Later posts will explain in more detail the implementation of Dr. Henry, and how to use it

For now, read on, to get a general overview of Dr. Henry.

What is Dr. Henry?

After recently deciding to use GitHub Pages for project sites, and personal blogging, I’ve been looking at the various options available to build sites.

Two main projects stood out. Octopress is very nice, feature rich, but requires rendering locally, with the output pushed to GitHub, which is not a workflow I wanted. Then there is jekyll-bootstrap, which satisfies the workflow requirement, has a fair bit of components developed, but is not actively maintained by the author, lacks a good home/category landing, and so on.

So Dr. Henry starts it’s life as a fork of jekyll-bootstrap. Why a name change? I expect I may drift away from the upstream, however, I’ve kept parallel branches to the upstream in case this can all get merged up.

So don’t expect a lot just yet, you are probably better off with jekyll-bootstrap for now. But if you’d like to look, checkout the repository page.

Updates on the progress will be posted right here, under itself as it develops. :)