UP: A Jekyll theme
After a while using Jekyll Bootstrap, I just realized that it was so much bloated. Then, few days ago, I forked the old Zach Holman’s blog, and started to tweak my own theme based on theirs (that now is opensource). At first, I like it, but after a while, I just start thinking that it had a “old style” design.
So, I decided to work in my own layout, and then, up was born.
Up is a clean and beautiful Bootstrap based layout for Jekyll.
It’s designed to be an easy layout to modify for your own blog. It was based on zachholman’s blog themes: the “old” one, now opensourced as left and in his actual theme, that’s not opensource (I believe), but I steal some ideas anyway. I also took something from jekyll-bootstrap, and, of course, I’m using bootstrap as a base for all the thing.
It’s fully-responsive (open it in your phone and/or tablet and you will see), with no JS at all (except twitter button, but you can remove it, of course), with a custom bootstrap build, compiled and minified with custom CSS in a very small CSS file (that’s why it’s really fast). Oh, I almost forgot: it also have an atom feed.
I also steal-and-tweak a Rakefile to made you able to easily create new posts and start server in preview mode.
Installation#
Up installation is not that hard. Just do this:
- Install Jekyll:
gem install jekyll - Fork this repository
- Rename it to
YOUR-USER.github.com - Clone it:
git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USER/YOUR-USER.github.com - Run the jekyll server in the blog folder:
rake preview.
You should have a server up and running locally at http://localhost:4000.
Customization#
Next you’ll want to change a few things. The list of files you may want to change is the following:
- _config.yml: Put your config there, almost everything will be up and running.
- about.html: Well, that’s about you, I would change it if I were you… OH WAIT!
- CNAME: If you’re using this on GitHub Pages with a custom domain name, you’ll want to change this to be the domain you’re going to use. All that should be in here is a domain name on the first line and nothing else (like:
example.com). - favicon.ico: This is a smaller version of my gravatar for use as the icon in your browser’s address bar. You should change it to whatever you’d like.
- apple-touch-icon.jpg: Again, this is my gravatar, and it shows up in iOS and various other apps that use this file as an “icon” for your site.
Create new posts#
Well, that’s simple. Just type rake post title="My awesome new post title".
BOOM, your all new post markdown file is created under _posts folder.
Deployment#
You should deploy with GitHub Pages- it’s just easier.
All you should have to do is rename your repository on GitHub to be username.github.com. Since everything is on the gh-pages branch, you should be able to see your new site at http://username.github.com.
Contributing#
If you made a awesome kick-ass change, and believe it would be awesome to up, made a pull-request in up repository!
I’ll be proud to accept your contributions.
Licensing#
This is MIT with no added caveats, so feel free to use this on your site without linking back to me or using a disclaimer or anything silly like that.
If you’d like give me, holman (from left), plusjade (from jekyll-bootstrap) or fat and mdo (from bootstrap) credit somewhere on your all-new blog or tweet a shout out to us, well hey, sure we’ll take it.