A minimal, responsive Jekyll theme for personal, academic, and technical writing websites.

Merida ships with layouts for an about page, blog, news, projects, and publications, plus dark mode, MathJax, Rouge syntax highlighting, copy buttons for code blocks, Pagefind search, SEO metadata, RSS feeds, and sitemap generation.

See Installation for startup paths, use cases, pros, cons, and setup commands.

• Responsive Tailwind CSS design with light, dark, and system theme modes.
• Blog and news collections with dedicated listing layouts.
• About page layout with optional profile image, latest posts, and latest news.
• Project list driven by _data/repos.yaml.
• Publication list driven by BibTeX and jekyll-scholar.
• Search modal powered by Pagefind after each Jekyll build.
• MathJax support for inline and display math.
• Rouge syntax highlighting with line numbers and copy buttons.
• SEO, sitemap, and feed support through standard Jekyll plugins.

• Ruby compatible with Jekyll 4.4.
• Bundler.
• Node.js and npm if you keep the starter's Pagefind hook or work on the theme source.
• Git for cloning the starter or theme source.

The theme depends on:

• jekyll
• jekyll-feed
• jekyll-last-modified-at
• jekyll-scholar
• jekyll-seo-tag
• jekyll-sitemap
• rouge
• webrick

• Installation
• Configuration
• Content Guide
• Customization
• Search
• Deployment
• Development
• Troubleshooting

Most site settings live in _config.yml:

title: Your Name
tagline: A text-focused Jekyll theme
description: A minimal, responsive and feature-rich Jekyll theme for technical writing.
url: "https://example.com"
baseurl: ""
permalink: /blog/:slug/

footer:
  show_last_update: true

Navigation and footer links are data-driven:

• _data/menu.yaml controls the navigation bar.
• _data/social.yaml controls footer social links.
• _data/repos.yaml controls the projects page.

See Configuration for every supported key and data shape.

Create posts in _posts:

---
layout: post
title: "My Post"
date: 2026-06-03 09:00:00 -0500
tags: [Jekyll, Writing]
---

Post content goes here.

Create news items in _news:

---
layout: post
title: "New Release"
date: 2026-06-03
description: "Merida is ready for launch."
---

Optional long-form news body.

Add publications to _bibliography/references.bib. Merida renders entries through jekyll-scholar and _layouts/bib.html.

npm run dev          # Tailwind watch + Jekyll serve
npm run css:build    # Build minified assets/css/merida.css
npm run css:watch    # Rebuild CSS on changes
bundle exec jekyll build

See CONTRIBUTING.md for local setup, contribution guidelines, and pull request expectations.

• For usage questions, see SUPPORT.md.
• For vulnerability reports, see SECURITY.md.

Merida is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.