A simple and minimal single-author theme with configurable big emoji as the header link, and configurable background colors, which can be chosen for each post or page.
The demo site has useful samples and shows how many color/emoji combinations are possible. I run a muted version of the theme using grey
as the main color on my own site.
Compatible with Jekyll >= 3.9.3 and GitHub Pages.
- Clean, minimalist design
- Single-column
- Single-author
- No visible authors, categories, or tags on posts or pages
- No header, footer, or menu
- No pagination for the home page to effectively be the archive and allow for searching all titles in-browser
- Posts
- Pages
- Fancy category pages (also on GitHub Pages, where additional plugins are not allowed)
- A styled redirection page, which will be used by the optional plugin Jekyll Redirect From
- Built-in feed and sitemap creation with styling (no dependency to jekyll-feed and jekyll-sitemap)
- Theme-color matching favicons
- Optional colorful index pages
- Header images
- Optional descriptions or excerpts in feed, SEO tags, and on category and home pages
- Content warnings for embedded videos
- Hidden semantic info for embedding and SEO like Open Graph, JSON-LD, and inline Microdata. No need for the
jekyll-seo-tag
plugin - Minimal build and load times
- Custom header and footer to add snippets
- Basic Webmention support (needs third-party service like Webmention.io or additional server software), which allows subscribing to a feed of Webmentions, which are cross-site notifications
Some features cannot be applied automatically due to how Jekyll integrates gem-based or remote themes. They have to be copied manually to your site’s root directory and are included in the demo repository.
- Category settings, and category and feed pages, e.g.
_data/categories.yml
,colors/index.md
, andcolors/feed.xml
- Custom error pages from directory
error
- Settings from
_config.yml
- Draft, build, and deploy support via
Rakefile.rb
, including creating a UUID for posts
Only the categories and custom error pages need to be edited, if you want to (category name, color, emoji, title, permalink, maybe extra textual content).
For categories to be properly working, the site needs category directories having index and feed files for each category. E.g. for the category "Features" a directory called features
with an index.md
and feed.xml
with at least the following content:
---
description: "A description for the head's meta description tag created by this theme"
category: manuals
layout: category
permalink: /:path/
sitemap: false
---
The name of the category has to match the corresponding category in _data/categories.yml
and the category itself. The category is either declared by adding the key category
to a post's front matter, but it is more convenient to have all posts of a certain category in a _posts
subdirectory of the category, e.g. features/_posts
for category features
.
Used categories have to be linked manually, because there is no menu.
The category icons and displayed titles are defined in _data/categories.yml
and have to match the category name’s slug as well.
Feeds for categories are automatically linked on the bottom of index pages and are embedded in the HTML page’s <head>
. They have to exist next to the above mentioned index.md
as feed.xml
.
For this automatism to work, posts and pages can only belong to a single category, which, if it is to be declared manually, with the key category:
. categories:
doesn’t work.
A header image is displayed after the title on posts and pages, if image
is added to the file's frontmatter.
---
image:
path: /images/sample-image.jpg
alt: The description of the image
title: The title of the image
---
This image is also used in feed.xml
and SEO tags as the displayed image.
The descriptions are declared in the post's frontmatter:
description: "A helpful description."
They should be limited to 160 characters, because some of the places where they are used are effectively limited in length. If no descriptions are declared, then page’s excerpt
will be used. This is either the manual declared one or Jekyll will create one automatically.
To display post descriptions on the home page, simply add the following to your _config.yml
:
theme_settings:
show_descriptions: true
There can be several favicons for a site running this theme, because it is possible to use different background colors, and the favicon should reflect the color theme. But there is also a site-wide favicon, which should reflect the style of the home page, and is used in the Atom feed.
Icons are embedded in pixel format and as SVG in a data URL. Pixel format for Safari browsers, SVG for the rest. Because your favicons are displayed in many 3rd-party apps, websites, and other places, a SVG-only or data-URL-only version wouldn't suffice. I recommend to use webp as the pixel format as it is widely supported and has the best file size to image quality ratio.
Icons should be named <color>.<image-type-extension>
without the preceding hash of a hex color, be in either jpg, png, webp image pixel format and SVG format at 180×180 resolution, and be located in /assets/icons/
. Theme-matching icons can be easily generated from Unicode glyphs, if custom colors are used.
Shell scripts for creating those icons are included in the directory _tools
. They use the star (★) by default. As mentioned in the linked article above, for other fonts or glyphs it might need some positioning to adjust for the metrics of the used font. For the SVG variant a custom representation has to be drawn. These scripts need the free convert
from ImageMagick to create the webp icons and base64
to create the data URL.
Icons for the default theme colors are included in webp and SVG format.
The XSLT files style the XML files. If a user selects the link to the feed, a styled version of the feed will be shown in the browser with an explainer of what web feeds are.
If some posts or pages should not appear in search engines, they can be removed from the sitemap.xml
, which helps search engines to find content. Additionally, a hidden header disallowing the indexing is added to the content, which respectable search engines follow. Add this to frontmatter to achieve this:
---
sitemap: false
---
When put in the directory _includes
, custom-header.html
and custom-footer.html
allow to put custom snippets in it.
Installation from Gem is recommended, but using a remote theme is also possible, even though it will increase build times a little, depending on your internet connection and the size of the theme download, because it will be downloaded during each build. Gems are installed locally.
GitHub Pages gem users need to use the remote theme method.
Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile
:
gem "jekyll-theme-emojification", group: [:jekyll_plugins]
Then run bundle
in your terminal.
bundle
Also add the theme to your Jekyll site's _config.yml
:
theme: jekyll-theme-emojification
Make sure that this is the only theme:
in _config.yml
, and that there are no other remote-theme:
.
Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile
:
gem "jekyll-remote-theme", group: [:jekyll_plugins]
Then run bundle
in your terminal.
bundle
Finally add the remote theme to your Jekyll site's _config.yml
:
remote_theme: michaelnordmeyer/jekyll-theme-emojification
Make sure that this is the only remote_theme:
in _config.yml
, and that there are no other theme:
.