Beautiful Jekyll
Beautiful Jekyll is a ready-to-use template to help you create an awesome website quickly. Perfect for personal blogs or simple project websites. Check out a demo of what you'll get after just two minutes. You can also look at my personal website to see it in use, or see examples of websites other people created using this theme here.
Table of contents
Prerequisites
- You need to have a GitHub account. If you don't have one, sign up here - it takes one minute. This is where your website will live - if you sign up with username
johnsmiththen your website will behttp://johnsmith.github.io. - It would be helpful to understand what Markdown is and how to write it. Markdown is just a way to take a piece of text and format it to look a little nicer. For example, this whole instruction set that you're reading is written in markdown - it's just text with some words being bold/larger/italicized/etc. I recommend taking 5 minutes to learn markdown with this amazingly easy yet useful tutorial.
Build your website in 3 steps
Getting started is literally as easy as 1-2-3 :smile:
Scroll down to see the steps involved, but here is a 40-second video just as a reference as you work through the steps.
1. Fork this repository
(Assuming you are on this page and logged into GitHub) Fork this repository by clicking the Fork button on the top right corner. Forking means that you now copied this whole project and all the files into your account.
2. Rename the repository to <yourusername>.github.io
This will create a GitHub User page ready with the Beautiful Jekyll template that will be available at http://<yourusername>.github.io within a couple minutes. To do this, click on Settings at the top (the cog icon) and there you'll have an option to rename.
3. Customize your website settings
Edit the _config.yml file to change all the settings to reflect your site. To edit the file, click on it and then click on the pencil icon (watch the video tutorial above if you're confused). The settings in the file are fairly self-explanatory. Any line that begins with a pound sign (#) is a comment, and the rest of the lines are actual settings.
After you save your changes to the config file (by clicking on Commit changes as the video tutorial shows), your website should be ready in a minute or two at http://<yourusername>.github.io. Every time you make a change to any file, your website will get rebuilt and should be updated in about a minute or so.
You can now visit your shiny new website, which will be seeded with several sample blog posts and a couple other pages. Your website is at http://<yourusername>.github.io (replace <yourusername> with your user name). Do not add www to the URL - it will not work!
Add your own content
To add pages to your site, you can either write a markdown file (.md) or you can write an HTML file directly. It is much easier to write markdown than HTML, so I suggest you do that. You can look at some files on this site to get an idea of how to write markdown. To look at existing files, click on any file that ends in .md. On the next page you can see some nicely formatted text (there is a word in bold, a link, bullet points), and if you click on the pencil icon to edit the file, you will see the markdown that generated the pretty text. Very easy!
In contrast, look at index.html. That's how your write HTML - not as pretty. So stick with markdown if you don't know HTML.
Credits
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.
Contributions
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!
Thank you to all contributors. Special thanks to the following people with non-trivial contributions (in chronological order): @hristoyankov, @jamesonzimmer, @XNerv, @epwalsh, @rtlee9.
If you do fork or clone 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 :)