Copyright 2018 Dean Attali
Beautiful Jekyll is a ready-to-use template to help you create an awesome website quickly. Perfect for personal sites, blogs, or simple project websites. Check out a demo of what you'll get after just two minutes. You can also look at my personal website to see it in use, or see examples of websites other people created using this theme here.
If you enjoy this theme, please consider supporting me for developing and maintaining this template.
- Prerequisites
- Add your own content
- Important thing: YAML front matter ("parameters" for a page)
- Features
- Credits and contributions
- It would be helpful to understand what Markdown is and how to write it. Markdown is just a way to take a piece of text and format it to look a little nicer. For example, this whole instruction set that you're reading is written in markdown - it's just text with some words being bold/larger/italicized/etc. I recommend taking 10-15 minutes to learn markdown with this amazingly easy yet useful tutorial.
If you would like to contribute to this blog, fork this repository and clone it on your system.
To add pages to your site, you can either write a markdown file (.md) or you can write an HTML file directly. It is much easier to write markdown than HTML, so I suggest you do that (use the tutorial I mentioned above if you need to learn markdown). You can look at some files on this site to get an idea of how to write markdown. To look at existing files, click on any file that ends in .md, for example aboutme.md. On the next page you can see some nicely formatted text (there is a word in bold, a link, bullet points), and if you click on the pencil icon to edit the file, you will see the markdown that generated the pretty text. Very easy!
Coming to the important part!
Any file that you add inside the _posts directory will be treated as a blog entry. You can look at the existing files there to get an idea of how to write blog posts.
In order to have your new pages use this template and not just be plain pages, you need to add YAML front matter to the top of each page. This is where you'll give each page some parameters that I made available, such as a title and subtitle. I'll go into more detail about what parameters are available later. If you don't want to use any parameters on your new page (this also means having no title), then use the empty YAML front matter:
---
---
If you want to use any parameters, write them between the two lines. For example, you can have this at the top of a page:
---
title: Contact me
subtitle: Here you'll find all the ways to get in touch with me
---
You can look at the top of aboutme.md or index.html as more examples.
Important takeaway: ALWAYS add the YAML front matter, which is two lines with three dashes, to EVERY page. If you have any parameters, they go between the two lines. If you don't include YAML then your file will not use the template.
Once you are done, feel free to send a pull request! As soon as it is merged, your post will be up on the blog. :)
If you would like to update the "About Us" section, you can do the necessary changes in the aboutme.md file.
Beautiful Jekyll is designed to look great on both large-screen and small-screen (mobile) devices. Load up your site on your phone or your gigantic iMac, and the site will work well on both, though it will look slightly different.
Many personalization settings in _config.yml, such as setting your name and site's description, changing the background colour/image, setting your avatar to add a little image in the navigation bar, customizing the links in the menus, customizing what social media links to show in the footer, etc.
If you want to enable comments on your site, Beautiful Jekyll supports the Disqus comments plugin. To use it, simply sign up to Disqus and add your Disqus shortname to the disqus parameter in the _config.yml.
If the disqus parameter is set in the configuration file, then all blog posts will have comments turned on by default. To turn off comments on a particular blog post, add comments: false to the YAML front matter. If you want to add comments on the bottom of a non-blog page, add comments: true to the YAML front matter.
Beautiful Jekyll lets you easily add Google Analytics to all your pages. This will let you track all sorts of information about visits to your website, such as how many times each page is viewed and where (geographically) your users come from. To add Google Analytics, simply sign up to Google Analytics to obtain your Google Tracking ID, and add this tracking ID to the google_analytics parameter in _config.yml.
By default, all blog posts will have buttons at the bottom of the post to allow people to share the current page on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn. You can choose to enable/disable specific social media websites in the _config.yml file. You can also turn off the social media buttons on specific blog posts using social-share: false in the YAML front matter.
Beautiful Jekyll automatically generates a simple RSS feed of your blog posts, to allow others to subscribe to your posts. If you want to add a link to your RSS feed in the footer of every page, find the rss: false line in _config.yml and change it to rss: true.
- post - To write a blog post, add a markdown or HTML file in the
_postsfolder. As long as you give it YAML front matter (the two lines of three dashes), it will automatically be rendered like a blog post. Look at the existing blog post files to see examples of how to use YAML parameters in blog posts. - page - Any page outside the
_postsfolder that uses YAML front matter will have a very similar style to blog posts. - minimal - If you want to create a page with minimal styling (ie. without the bulky navigation bar and footer), assign
layout: minimalto the YAML front matter. - If you want to completely bypass the template engine and just write your own HTML page, simply omit the YAML front matter. Only do this if you know how to write HTML!
These are the main parameters you can place inside a page's YAML front matter that Beautiful Jekyll supports.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| title | Page or blog post title |
| subtitle | Short description of page or blog post that goes under the title |
| tags | List of tags to categorize the post. Separate the tags with commas and place them inside square brackets. Example: [personal, self help, finance] |
| bigimg | Include a large full-width image at the top of the page. You can either give the path to a single image, or provide a list of images to cycle through (see my personal website as an example). |
| comments | If you want do add Disqus comments to a specific page, use comments: true. Comments are automatically enabled on blog posts; to turn comments off for a specific post, use comments: false. Comments only work if you set your Disqus id in the _config.yml file. |
| show-avatar | If you have an avatar configured in the _config.yml but you want to turn it off on a specific page, use show-avatar: false. If you want to turn it off by default, locate the line show-avatar: true in the file _config.yml and change the true to false; then you can selectively turn it on in specific pages using show-avatar: true. |
| image | If you want to add a personalized image to your blog post that will show up next to the post's excerpt and on the post itself, use image: /path/to/img. |
| share-img | If you want to specify an image to use when sharing the page on Facebook or Twitter, then provide the image's full URL here. |
| social-share | If you don't want to show buttons to share a blog post on social media, use social-share: false (this feature is turned on by default). |
| use-site-title | If you want to use the site title rather than page title as HTML document title (ie. browser tab title), use use-site-title: true. When set, the document title will take the format Site Title - Site Description (eg. My website - A virtual proof that name is awesome!). By default, it will use Page Title if it exists, or Site Title otherwise. |
| layout | What type of page this is (default is post for blog posts and page for other pages. You can use minimal if you don't want a header and footer) |
| js | List of local JavaScript files to include in the page (eg. /js/mypage.js) |
| ext-js | List of external JavaScript files to include in the page (eg. //cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/underscore.js/1.8.2/underscore-min.js). External JavaScript files that support Subresource Integrity (SRI) can be specified using the href and sri parameters eg.href: "//code.jquery.com/jquery-3.1.1.min.js"sri: "sha256-hVVnYaiADRTO2PzUGmuLJr8BLUSjGIZsDYGmIJLv2b8=" |
| css | List of local CSS files to include in the page |
| ext-css | List of external CSS files to include in the page. External CSS files using SRI (see ext-js parameter) are also supported. |
| googlefonts | List of Google fonts to include in the page (eg. ["Monoton", "Lobster"]) |
| gh-repo | If you want to show GitHub buttons at the top of a post, this sets the GitHub repo name (eg. daattali/beautiful-jekyll). You must also use the gh-badge parameter to specify what buttons to show. |
| gh-badge | Select which GitHub buttons to display, available options are: [star, watch, fork, follow]. You must also use the gh-repo parameter to specify the GitHub repo. |
This is just for reference purposes, in case you wish to have your own profile/project page.
If you want to use this theme to host a website that will be available at https://YOURUSERNAME.github.io, then you do not need to read this section. That is called a User Page, you can only have one User Page in your GitHub account, and it is what you get by default when forking this project.
If you want to use this theme to create a website for a particular repository, it will be available at https://YOURUSERNAME.github.io/REPONAME, and that is called a Project Page. You can have a Project Page for each repository you have on GitHub. There are two important things to note when creating a project page:
- In the configuration file (
_config.yml), you should setbaseurlto be/projectnameinstead of"". - Project Pages are served from a branch named
gh-pages, and you should be generating all the website content on that branch.
This template was not made entirely from scratch. I would like to give special thanks to:
- Barry Clark and his project Jekyll Now, from whom I've taken several ideas and code snippets, as well as some documenation tips.
- Iron Summit Media and their project Bootstrap Clean Blog, from which I've used some design ideas and some of the templating code for posts and pagination.
I'd also like to thank Dr. Jekyll's Themes, Jekyll Themes, and another Jekyll Themes for featuring Beautiful Jekyll in their Jekyll theme directories.
If you find anything wrong or would like to contribute in any way, feel free to create a pull request/open an issue/send me a message. Any comments are welcome!
Thank you to all contributors. Special thanks to @OCram85 for contributing multiple times as well as helping with discussions.
If you do fork or clone this project to use as a template for your site, I would appreciate if you keep the link in the footer to this project. I've noticed that several people who forked this repo removed the attribution and I would prefer to get the recognition if you do use this :)