About

Monochrome is a minimal, responsive, ready to use Jekyll theme for blogging. Demo (Built on top of Emerald Jekyll theme)

Features

• Completely responsive and mobile first
• Clean SEO friendly URLs, auto-generated from post title (no messy dates in the url)
• SEO title/description integration
• Sitemap ready
• Pagination support
• Mobile friendly navigation menu
• Easy customization for header, footer, navigation links, colors, favicon etc
• Default Monochrome Color Palette - black, white, greys
• About page
• 404 page
• ..and a lot more

Install/Setup Jekyll

(Skip if you already have Jekyll 2.2)

1. Make sure Ruby 2.2 is installed

   sudo apt-get install ruby2.2
   sudo apt-get install ruby2.2-dev

2. Install bundle: sudo gem install bundler
3. Install jekyll: sudo gem install jekyll

Resources

• We found the jekyll tutorials on youtube very quick and useful to get started
• Jekyll documentation

Install Monochrome dependencies

sudo gem install jekyll-paginate
sudo gem install jekyll-sitemap

Get Started with Monochrome

Option 1

• Fork this repository
• (Optional) Change the 'baseurl' value in the 'config.yml' file, from '/blog' to your preferred directory/project name (example '/xyz' or '/' to install in root)
• Clone the forked repository to your local machine to make changes
• Run 'jekyll serve' and open browser to 'localhost:4000/blog/' to see your changes
• (Optional) Host with github pages

Note: If you fork the repository, your version of the repository will not be searchable. If you want searchability, we suggest you use the next option.

Option 2

• Simply download the .zip folder from the repository github page
• Extract the contents from the .zip folder into your local folder
• cd into monochrome/
• Run 'jekyll serve' and open browser to 'localhost:4000/blog/' to see your changes
• Create a repository in github and push the files
• (Optional) Host with github pages

Write a Post

• cd into _posts/
• create new file with format yyyy-mm-dd-title-of-post.md
• add title/description (refer any of the test posts)
• add markdown and save

Customization Options

You can customize this layout using instructions below.

Header/Footer/Navigation

Set a custom header tag by setting the related option in the _config.yml file to "true". Then insert your custom code into the header-custom.html file. In the same way, you can customize the footer of the navigation menu, by setting to "true" the related option and put your code into the nav-footer-custom.html file. Moreover select a reverse option that allows to move the navigation menu to the left side, by setting it to "true".

Colors

The basic colors are set into the base.scss file:

• $background-color: used for background and links in the navigation menu
• $text-color: used for text and title in posts and pages
• $text-light-color: used for text lighter than text-color
• $text-dark-color: used for text darker than text-color

To customize the colors, just set the values in HEX, RGB (or RGBa) or any other format accepted by CSS.

Navigation menu

The links inside the navigation menu are autogenerated from pages having the layout set to page. You can set custom links, by putting in the <a> tag into the link.html file.

Branch

There are two branches:

• master: is for development.
• gh-pages: is only for demo site.

Baseurl

You can change the 'baseurl' value in the 'config.yml' file, from '/monochrome' to your preferred directory/project name (example '/xyz' or '/' to install in root)

Typography

To maintain the vertical rhythm, it has been applied a Typographic scale as a modular scale, with a baseline set to 24px. To maintain this rhythm you need to insert elements like image, video or other contents with a 24px (or multiple) height as refer.

Resources

• We found the jekyll tutorials on youtube very quick and useful to get started
• Jekyll documentation

Todo

• Google Analytics integration
• Footer to stick to bottom even when content is less

Author

TheReviewIndex

• Dyuti Barma
• Web site: Review Aggregation and Summary Site for India - TheReviewIndex.com

License

Released under MIT License.