HydeBar

Earlier this year I wrote at the end of this post:

PS: In the meantime I switched complete to Markdown and Jekyll, a static site generator - but this is another story for another post …

As always - it took a bit longer then expected. In the meantime I was fiddling around with Jekyll and modifying the default theme Minima to my needs. Then I stumbled over the JSDoc theme Minami and the Liquid docs site - both with nice sidebars. I wanted to have such a nice sidebar for my dev blog and began to look deeper how it was implemented. To my surprise the sidebar from the JSDoc theme Minami was complete CSS driven - cool.

It took me a while to full understand how it was working. With this knowledge and the design inspirations I was able to improve the Jekyll default theme to a sidebar template. As a bonus I integrated the HTML based slideshow library Reveal.js - you can write now your blog posts and slides with markdown.

The nice thing about blogging with markdown is, that you don’t need to switch your tools - you use the usual ones from the daily programming job. It goes even better when you use GitHub: You commit your changes and GitHub takes care about generating your blog content from your sources. And the result is a fast and secure static site.

I had a accepted talk at the DOAG Conference + Exhibition 2017 in the stream “Strategy & Business Practices” about blogging for developers with Jekyll. Unfortunately short before I had an accident and broke my right upper arm :-(

My colleague Markus Dötsch was taking over the presentation and I concentrated on delivering the free time project “Jekyll sidebar template”. This was the working title before I renamed it to “HydeBar” - a play with “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and the fact, that it is a sidebar template.

Yesterday I released version 1.0.0. You can start blogging for free in five minutes with this quick start guide. The online demo is serving as template, documentation and showcase. The mentioned slides from the DOAG Conference are included in this demo (in German, sorry…).

Happy blogging :-)

Ottmar