My own Jekyll theme

Every GitHub Pages blog starts out with the default Minima theme, which looks ugly, boring, and, well… default.

So I started looking to other themes. The default Pages gem mostly contains documentation themes without a post index. I liked the look of the hacker theme, as I am an avid Retro enjoyer. I soon found a Retro Windows 95 theme, but it was old and broken, and my attempts at repairing it led to not much. So, I started writing my own Jekyll theme.

The basic idea was clear pretty soon: I wanted it to look and be clean and simple, both in and out, and it should support blogging. I got inspiration from the layout of XKCD, with its cleanly divided blocks. So, I fired up WebStorm, and started writing, with great help from Copilot. The 404 and Home pages I “borrowed” from Minima, with some changes to suit me. The site started with HTML and CSS, but I soon switched to SCSS for its modularity.

The first iteration, however, was heavily criticised for its ugly color theme. So, I got human help, and together, [Micodo] and I created a clean, dark but colored, color scheme.

Then came chaos: I decided to split the theme from the blog, and publish it to RubyGems. My first attempt at using git subtree ended miserably, as moving files does not retain history. In an effort that took an entire afternoon, I rebased my edits onto a copy of the original repository, and meticoulously edited history to make it seem like I had planned this all the time. And finally, it worked: The history now accurately shows the development of my own Jekyll theme.

You can use it too! Simply follow the instructions in its GitHub Repository (or on the Page built from it), and make sure your Page uses a Gem build.