Left

Left is a clean, whitespace-happy layout for Jekyll.

This is designed to be an easy layout to modify for your own blog. It was extracted from zachholman.com, which means it was battle-hardened from years of posting serious blog posts about emoji and swear words.

Installation

• Install Jekyll: gem install jekyll
• Fork this repository
• Clone it: git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USER/left
• Run the jekyll server: jekyll --server

You should have a server up and running locally at http://localhost:4000.

Jekyll YAML frontmatter reference

Using

rake post title="A Title" [date="2012-02-09"] [tags=[tag1, tag2]]
rake page name="about.html"
# You can also specify a sub-directory path.
# If you don't specify a file extention we create an index.html at the path specified

Customization

Next you'll want to change a few things. Most of them can be changed directly in _config.yml. That's where we'll pull your name, Twitter username, and things like that.

There's a few other places that you'll want to change, too:

• CNAME: If you're using this on GitHub Pages with a custom domain name, you'll want to change this to be the domain you're going to use. All that should be in here is a domain name on the first line and nothing else (like: example.com).
• favicon.ico: This is a smaller version of my gravatar for use as the icon in your browser's address bar. You should change it to whatever you'd like.
• apple-touch-icon.png: Again, this is my gravatar, and it shows up in iOS and various other apps that use this file as an "icon" for your site.

Deployment

You should deploy with GitHub Pages- it's just easier.

All you should have to do is rename your repository on GitHub to be username.github.com. Since everything is on the gh-pages branch, you should be able to see your new site at http://username.github.com.

Licensing

This is MIT with no added caveats, so feel free to use this on your site without linking back to me or using a disclaimer or anything silly like that.

If you'd like give me credit somewhere on your blog or tweet a shout out to @holman, well hey, I'll take it.