Theme Setup
General notes and suggestions for customizing HPSTR.
Basic Setup for a new Jekyll site
- Install Jekyll and read through the documentation if you haven’t already.
- Fork the HPSTR Jekyll Theme repo
- Clone the repo you just forked to your computer.
- Edit
to personalize your site.1
_config.yml
- Check out the sample posts in
to see examples for pulling in large feature images, tags, and other YAML data.1
_posts
- Read the documentation below for further customization pointers and documentation.
Pro-tip: Delete the
branch after cloning and start fresh by branching off 1
gh-pages
. There is a bunch of garbage in 1
master
used for the theme’s demo that I’m guessing you don’t want on your site.1
gh-pages
Setup for an Existing Jekyll site
- Clone the following folders:
,1
_includes
,1
_layouts
, and1
assets
.1
images
- Clone the following files and personalize content as need:
,1
about.md
,1
archive.html
,1
index.html
, and1
tags.html
.1
feed.xml
- Set the following variables in your
file:1
config.yml
Folder Structure
Customization
_config.yml
Most of the variables found here are used in the .html files found in
if you need to add or remove anything. A good place to start would be to add the 1
_includes
, 1
title
, and 1
description
for your site. Links are absolute and prefixed with 1
url
in the various 1
{{ site.url }}
and 1
_includes
, so remember to comment out 1
_layouts
1 when working locally to avoid broken links.1
url
Disqus Comments
Create a Disqus account and change
in 1
disqus_shortname
to the Disqus shortname you just setup. To enable commenting on a post, add the following to its front matter:1
_config.yml
Social Share Links
To enable Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ share links on a post or page, add the following to its front matter:
Owner/Author Information
Change your name, and avatar photo (200x200 pixels or larger), email, and social networking URLs. If you want to link to an external image on Gravatar or something similar you’ll need to edit the path in
since it assumes it is located in 1
head.html
.1
/images
Including a link to your Google+ profile has the added benefit of displaying Google Authorship in Google search results if you’ve went ahead and applied for it.
Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
Your Google Analytics ID goes here along with meta tags for Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools site verification.
Navigation Menu Links
Edit page/post titles and URLs to include in the site’s navigation. For external links add
.1
external: true
Other Stuff
The rest is just your average Jekyll config settings. Nothing too crazy here…
_includes
For the most part you can leave these as is since the author/owner details are pulled from
. That said you’ll probably want to customize the copyright stuff in 1
_config.yml
to your liking.1
footer.html
Adding Posts and Pages
There are two main content layouts:
(for posts) and 1
post.html
(for pages). Both have support for large feature images that span the full-width of the screen, and both are meant for text heavy blog posts (or articles).1
page.html
Feature Images
A good rule of thumb is to keep feature images nice and wide so you don’t push the body text too far down. An image cropped around around 1024 x 256 pixels will keep file size down with an acceptable resolution for most devices. If you want to serve these images responsively I’d suggest looking at the Jekyll Picture Tag2 plugin.
The two layouts make the assumption that the feature images live in the images folder. To add a feature image to a post or page just include the filename in the front matter like so.
If you want to apply attribution to a feature image use the following YAML front matter on posts or pages. Image credits appear directly below the feature image with a link back to the original source.
Post/Page Thumbnails for OG and Twitter Cards
Post and page thumbnails work the same way. These are used by Open Graph and Twitter Cards meta tags found in
. If you don’t assign a thumbnail the image you assigned to 1
head.html
in 1
site.owner.avatar
will be used.1
_config.yml
Here’s an example of what a tweet to your site could look like if you activate Twitter Cards and include all the metas in your post’s YAML.
Videos
Video embeds are responsive and scale with the width of the main content block with the help of FitVids.
Not sure if this only effects Kramdown or if it’s an issue with Markdown in general. But adding YouTube video embeds causes errors when building your Jekyll site. To fix add a space between the
tags and remove 1
<iframe>
. Example below:1
allowfullscreen
Twitter Cards
Twitter cards make it possible to attach images and post summaries to Tweets that link to your content. Summary Card meta tags have been added to
to support this, you just need to validate and apply your domain to turn it on.1
head.html
Link Post Type
Link blog like a champ by adding
to a post’s YAML front matter. Arrow glyph links to the post’s permalink and the the 1
link: http://url-you-want-linked
links to the source URL. Here’s an example of a link post if you need a visual.1
post-title
Theme Development
If you want to easily skin the themes’ colors and fonts, take a look at
in 1
variables.less
and make the necessary changes to the color and font variables. To make development easier I setup a Grunt build script to compile/minify the LESS files into 1
assets/less/
and lint/concatenate/minify all scripts into 1
main.min.css
. Install Node.js, then install Grunt, and then install the dependencies for the theme contained in 1
scripts.min.js
:1
package.json
From the theme’s root, use
to rebuild the CSS, concatenate JavaScript files, and optimize .jpg, .png, and .svg files in the 1
grunt
folder. You can also use 1
images/
in combination with 1
grunt watch
to watch for updates to your LESS and JS files that Grunt will then automatically re-build as you write your code which will in turn auto-generate your Jekyll site when developing locally.1
jekyll build --watch
And if the command line isn’t your thing (you’re using Jekyll so it probably is), CodeKit for OS X and Prepros for Windows are great alternatives.
Questions?
Having a problem getting something to work or want to know why I setup something in a certain way? Ping me on Twitter @mmistakes or file a GitHub Issue. And if you make something cool with this theme feel free to let me know.
License
This theme is free and open source software, distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. So feel free to use this Jekyll theme on your site without linking back to me or including a disclaimer.
-
Used to generate absolute urls in
,1
sitemap.xml
, and for canonical urls in1
feed.xml
. Don’t include a trailing1
head.html
in your base url ie: http://mademistakes.com. When developing locally remove or comment out this line so local CSS, JS, and image assets are used. ↩1
/
-
If you’re using GitHub Pages to host your site be aware that plugins are disabled. So you’ll need to build your site locally and then manually deploy if you want to use this sweet plugin. ↩