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, 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.
- 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 |
| 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. |
| fb-img | If you want to share a page on Facebook, by default Facebook will use the first image it can find on the page. If you want to specify an image to use when sharing the page on Facebook, then provide the image's URL here |
| layout | What type of page this is (default is blog 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) |
| css | List of local CSS files to include in the page |
| ex-css | List of external CSS files to include in the page |
| googlefonts | List of Google fonts to include in the page (eg. ["Monoton", "Lobster"]) |
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.
If you're not sure what the difference is, then ignore this section.
If you want to use this theme for a project page for a specific repository instead of your main GitHub user page, that's no problem. The demo for this site (daattali.github.io/beautiful-jekyll) is actually set up as a project page while my personal site (daattali.github.io) is a regular user page. The only difference is that in the _config.yml, you should set baseurl to be /projectname instead of "".
To set up a GitHub Project page, simply fork this repository into a branch called gh-pages in your repository. Whatever is under the gh-pages branch will be served by Jekyll. Your site will be at http://username.github.io/projectname/.
I wrote a blog post describing some more advanced features that I used in my website that are applicable to any Jekyll site. It describes how I used a custom URL for my site (deanattali.com instead of daattali.github.io), how to add a Google-powered search into your site, and provides a few more details about having an RSS feed.
To my huge surprise, Beautiful Jekyll has been used in over 500 websites in its first 6 months. Here is a hand-picked selection of some websites that use Beautiful Jekyll.
Want your website featured here? Contact me to let me know about your website.
| Website | Description |
|---|---|
| teampass.net | Collaborative Passwords Manager |
| derekogle.com/fishR | Using R for Fisheries Analyses |
| bigdata.juju.solutions | Creating Big Data solutions Juju Solutions |
| joecks.github.io/clipboard-actions | Clipboard Actions - an Android app |
| embedded.guide | Writing an Embedded OS |
| blabel.github.io | Library for canonicalising blank node labels in RDF graphs |
| organicrails.github.io | Ruby on Rails tutorial |
| esentire.github.io | Blog about threats and malware |
| reactionic.github.io | Create iOS and Android apps with React and Ionic |
| Website | Who | What |
|---|---|---|
| deanattali.com | Dean Attali | Creator of Beautiful Jekyll |
| ouzor.github.io | Juuso Parkkinen | Data scientist |
| derekogle.com | Derek Ogle | Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Natural Resources |
| tomwhite.io | Thomas White | Ecology PhD student |
| trappmartin.github.io | Martin Trapp | Machine learning researcher |
| melyanna.github.io | Melyanna | Shows off her nice art |
| chaitanyajoshi.xyz | Chaitanya Joshi | Computer Science undergrad |
| chauff.github.io | Claudia Hauff | Professor at Delft University of Technology |
| kootenpv.github.io | Pascal van Kooten | Data analytics |
| sjackman.ca | Shaun Jackman | PhD candidate in bioinformatics |
Beautiful Jekyll is meant to be so simple to use that you can do it all within the browser. However, if you'd like to develop locally on your own machine, that's possible too if you're comfortable with command line. Folow these simple steps to do that with Vagrant:
- Install VirtualBox and Vagrant
- Clone your fork
git clone [email protected]:yourusername/yourusername.github.io.git - Inside your repository folder, run
vagrant up - View your website at
http://0.0.0.0:4000on *nix orhttp://127.0.0.1:4000on Windows. - Commit any changes and push everything to the master branch of your GitHub repository. GitHub Pages will then rebuild and serve your website automatically.
Disclaimer: I personally am NOT using local development so I don't know much about running Jekyll locally. If you follow this route, please don't ask me questions because unfortunately I honestly won't be able to help!
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!
If you do fork 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 :)
- If you have a project page and you want a custom 404 page, you must have a custom domain. See https://help.github.com/articles/custom-404-pages/. This means that if you have a regular User Page you can use the 404 page from this theme, but if it's a website for a specific repository, the 404 page will not be used.