herald is a standalone application that automates publishing release notes to any Tumblog, but especially notes.implicit.ly. It transforms notes from Markdown to HTML using Knockoff, and posts them using Dispatch.

Install herald using conscript:

cs n8han/herald

Release notes for your project are expected under a notes/ directory in the root of the project. In this directory, notes for a particular version are named <version>.markdown while an optional short description about the project can be placed in about.markdown. For example, in herald's tree you'll find the following:

herald/
  notes/
    0.1.0.markdown
    0.1.1.markdown
    about.markdown

When publishing and previewing, the description from about.markdown is appended to the selected version's release notes as boilerplate.

If you're publishing to the Scala software announcement site notes.implicit.ly, please keep in mind that the post's title will be the name of your project and its corresponding version: these should not be repeated as a heading in the notes. It is best to lead with copy describing the changes in your release, or a list of those changes. For major releases with changes divided into sections, use an h3 (a line prefixed by ### in Markdown) or smaller heading. The short description about.markdown should be one or two sentences long, with a link to more information about your project.

You can preview your release notes for any project by running herald in its base directory. Herald assumes the notes you want to work with are the highest numbered ones in your notes directory.

This plugin comes preconfigured to publish to notes.implicit.ly. To be added as a contributor to notes.implicit.ly, send n8han an email with a link to your Scala project if it isn't on github.

Herald authorizes directly with Tumblr so that you don't need to enter any credentials. Run herald preview in a project directory and click "Authorize with Tumblr" in the opened browser window. Approve Herald to access the Tumblr account you wish to publish from.

Your authorization credentials are saved in ~/.herald and may be revoked at any time in your Tumblr preferences.

Once you've previewed your source notes and released your project binaries, you're ready to announce to the world. You can Publish right from the preview browser, or from the command line.

herald --publish

If the release notes publication is successful, the published URL will open in the default broswer.

If you try to build herald from source you'll get a compilation error; the source file containing our Tumblr consumer keys is gitignored. If you want to contribute or just play around with the source, open an issue for this.