preview draft posts on github ?

[andysouth]

Hi Barry, Thanks for your very helpful work which I've used to set up a code centric blog.

I particularly liked not having to install jekyll etc. locally.

I've just realised that I can't think of a way to preview what a draft posts will look like without publishing it for everyone to see. My principal concern is that I don't want posts to be published by a particular feed aggregator until I've finished them. Any suggestions ?

Thanks,
Andy

[barryclark]

Nice, @andysouth. Looks great!

Nice to hear that you enjoyed not having to install Jekyll too 😃

I do this by adding a draft=true configuration flag into the front matter for any posts that I want to be hidden. Then exclude those posts when looping through index.html, like this:

{% for post in site.posts %}
    {% unless post.draft %}
    <article class="post">    

      <h1><a href="{{ site.baseurl }}{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></h1>

      <div class="date">
        {{ post.date | date: "%B %e, %Y" }}
      </div>

      <div class="entry">
        <img class="alignright" src="{{ site.imagesurl }}{{ post.thumbnail }}" >
        {{ post.content | split:"<!--more-->" | first }}
      </div>

      <a href="{{ site.baseurl }}{{ post.url }}" class="read-more">Read More</a>
    </article>
    {% endunless %}
  {% endfor %}

Not sure if that's the best way, but it works for me. That way I can send people the post URL directly too if I want to give some people a preview.

Check out http://jekyllrb.com/docs/drafts/ too, although I haven't used that too much.

,
Barry

[andysouth]

Super, Thanks Barry !

That pointed me in the right direction. I added the draft: true flag to posts and {% unless post.draft %} ... {% endunless %} to index.html. I then found I needed to add the additional loop to feed.xml and _layouts/blog_index.html so that the draft posts didn't appear in my feed or index.

Now it's doing exactly what I want. (and I'm unreasonably excited by having written a loop in html for the first time!)
Thanks again,
Andy

[barryclark]

Yay! Glad you got it figured out, Andy :)

[lostmsu]

@barryclark can you make this a default feature?