Features

  • Blog in markdown using Jekyll!
  • Include any Font Awesome icon 
    <i class="fa fa-check-square"></i>
  • Use icons and other HTML mixed with your markdown (ex: external link) 
    [external link<i class="fa fa-external-link"></i>](https://google.com){:target="_blank"}
  • Use a splash page with no header or footer
  • Include a preview of posts or not with preview_posts: true
  • Change the number of posts on each page with paginate in the config
  • List entries by tag (see setup below to learn how to setup tag pages)

Setup

Deploy

This setup guide is for deploying to Github-pages. This is a very specific method, and if you’re looking for a more general setup guide, check out this guide.

Now that GitHub does build custom Jekyll themes, you can simply add remote_theme: brettinternet/minimaless to the _config.yml file. Consult GitHub blog post on the topic for more information. The easiest method is to simply fork this repo. Then, edit the files you’d like. Because Github doesn’t allow used to not allow automated builds from custom Jekyll themes, there’s another simple work around illustrated below.

I prefer the following unique method because using bundle update to update the gems is a simple task. I use Travis CI to build from a Rakefile similar to Github’s Rakefile for building Github-pages sites. Similar upgrading can be performed from upstream if you choose to fork the theme using git.

  1. Install Jekyll
  2. Create a new Jekyll project with 
    jekyll new <your-project-name>
  3. Edit the Gemfile and replace the line indicating the default theme: 
    gem "minimaless"
  4. Run bundle install to install minimaless
  5. Add the following files to app’s root-level folder:
    • Add an index.md file with the following header: 
        ---
  layout: about
  ---
    • Add blog.md: 
        ---
  layout: blog
  title: Blog
  permalink: /blog/
  ---
    • Add contact.md: 
        ---
  layout: contact
  title: Contact
  permalink: /contact/
  ---
  6. Copy the project’s _config.yml and paste it over the existing config file. Replace the variable definitions to customize your site.
  7. Include a description of yourself or the site in the index.md.
  8. Create a directory called assets/ and add a logo.svg (or any vector/image file extension you prefer) and a favicon.png for your site.
  9. Copy the Rakefile and Rakefile configuration settings at the bottom of _config.yml.
    1. Change these variables to match your own settings.
    2. Add your encrypted GH token (notes on how to encrypt are commented in the .travis.yml).
    3. Add gem 'rake', '12.0.0' to your Gemfile.
  10. Turn on building in Travis CI for your site’s repo. Then, push your site’s source code to a new branch called source and the build should trigger and run the Rakefile. Once the build is push to master, Travis CI may attempt to build the master repo (and fail) unless you select the option to only run Travis CI when a .travis.yml is present.
    • Instead of using Travis CI to build your site remotely when you push, you could also build your site locally and push your site to a separate gh-pages branch by following these instructions.
  11. You may consider using something like prose.io to manage your blog posts from the web.

Tags

Make a new folder called tag where you will add markdown files for each new tag you use on your site.

minimaless
├─ tag
│  └─ kittens.md
└─ _posts

Create a new markdown file with the tag as the file name (eg. <tag name>.md). You only need to set up the header information. For example, if the tag is kittens, then use the following header:

---
layout: tags
tag: kittens
permalink: /tag/kittens/
---

This must be done for every new tag you create. This is the page that users will see when they click on a tag. View the tag page here.