zer0-mistakes

Overview

zer0-mistakes (github.com/bamr87/zer0-mistakes) is a Bootstrap 5 + Jekyll starter theme with Docker tooling, GitHub Pages deployment, and analytics, published to RubyGems as jekyll-theme-zer0. This repository’s declared purpose, beyond showcasing the theme, is to function as a second brain for zer0-mistakes — a place where research, decisions, and usage knowledge about the theme accumulate and can feed back into its development, distinct from the theme’s own repository.

zer0-pages is zer0-mistakes’ primary (and, as far as this vault knows, first) real-world consumer: it pulls in jekyll-theme-zer0 (~> 1.25) as a normal RubyGems dependency and builds its entire published site on top of it.

Key Facts

• What zer0-pages gets from the gem: nearly all layouts (default, article, note, section, …), includes, and vendored Bootstrap 5 come straight from jekyll-theme-zer0. pages/_layouts/ keeps only two local 3-line wrapper layouts (post, tutorial) over the gem’s article layout.
• What zer0-pages must supply itself: Jekyll never loads _data/ from a theme gem, so every data file the theme reads — navigation/*.yml, ui-text.yml, authors.yml, theme_skins.yml, theme_backgrounds.yml, content_statistics.yml, features.yml — lives in pages/_data/ in this repo, not upstream.
• A deliberate non-reuse: zer0-mistakes ships its own obsidian_links.rb Obsidian bridge plugin, but zer0-pages does not use it — plugins never load from theme gems in Jekyll, and that plugin resolves wikilinks by title, while this vault’s links are path-qualified ([[path/from/vault-root|Display]]). Copying it in would double-convert links. pages/_plugins/ is zer0-pages’ own, independent bridge.
• Local theme development path: the root CLAUDE.md documents a temporary Gemfile override — gem "jekyll-theme-zer0", path: "../github/zer0-mistakes" — for hacking on the theme against a local checkout, with the explicit rule that the committed Gemfile must always reference the published gem.
• Existing contributor documentation: pages/_docs/development/index.md (“Contributing to Zer0-Mistakes”) is a contributor-accessible overview of the theme’s build/release/testing/security workflow (release management, version bumping, CI/CD, testing, security scanning, dependency updates, scripting, its own PRD). It explicitly defers deep technical reference — architecture, script internals, release-automation internals — to the docs/ directory inside the zer0-mistakes repo itself, rather than reproducing it here.

Why It Matters

zer0-mistakes is the one dependency zer0-pages cannot function without: remove the gem and there is no theme, no layouts, no Bootstrap. The relationship runs the other direction too, per the stated second-brain goal — zer0-pages is meant to be where knowledge about zer0-mistakes accumulates (design rationale, usage patterns, gotchas discovered while consuming it) so that future theme work benefits from what this vault learns, not just the other way around.

Gap (open, as of this ingestion)

As of 2026-07-06, that second-brain relationship is declared but not yet built out: this vault has no synthesized content about zer0-mistakes’ own internals (its plugin architecture, release-automation design, or the reasoning behind its API) — only user-facing “how to consume this theme” docs that point outward to the zer0-mistakes repo for anything deeper. Closing this gap would mean running /wiki-ingest or /autoresearch against zer0-mistakes’ own docs/ directory and filing the results here, rather than leaving it as an external link.

Connections

• zer0-pages — the consumer repo; the two together are meant to form the author/theme pair this second-brain relationship describes.
• claude-obsidian — the engine that would do the actual ingesting if/when the gap above is closed.
• Jekyll/Obsidian Dual-Rendering Architecture — the architecture zer0-pages layers on top of the zer0-mistakes gem.

Sources

• Root CLAUDE.md — “Theme” section (gem version, local-dev override, why obsidian_links.rb isn’t reused).
• README.md — architecture diagram and “Learn more” section.
• Contributing to Zer0-Mistakes — the vault’s existing (surface-level) documentation of the theme’s contribution workflow.