UP: A Jekyll theme

After a while using Jekyll Bootstrap, I just realized that it was so much bloated. Then, few days ago, I forked the old Zach Holman’s blog, and started to tweak my own theme based on theirs (that now is opensource). At first, I like it, but after a while, I just start thinking that it had a “old style” design.

So, I decided to work in my own layout, and then, up was born.

Up is a clean and beautiful Bootstrap based layout for Jekyll.

It’s designed to be an easy layout to modify for your own blog. It was based on zachholman’s blog themes: the “old” one, now opensourced as left and in his actual theme, that’s not opensource (I believe), but I steal some ideas anyway. I also took something from jekyll-bootstrap, and, of course, I’m using bootstrap as a base for all the thing.

It’s fully-responsive (open it in your phone and/or tablet and you will see), with no JS at all (except twitter button, but you can remove it, of course), with a custom bootstrap build, compiled and minified with custom CSS in a very small CSS file (that’s why it’s really fast). Oh, I almost forgot: it also have an atom feed.

I also steal-and-tweak a Rakefile to made you able to easily create new posts and start server in preview mode.

Installation

Up installation is not that hard. Just do this:

• Install Jekyll: gem install jekyll
• Fork this repository
• Rename it to YOUR-USER.github.com
• Clone it: git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USER/YOUR-USER.github.com
• Run the jekyll server in the blog folder: rake preview.

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

Customization

Next you’ll want to change a few things. The list of files you may want to change is the following:

• _config.yml: Put your config there, almost everything will be up and running.
• about.html: Well, that’s about you, I would change it if I were you… OH WAIT!
• 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.jpg: 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.

Create new posts

Well, that’s simple. Just type rake post title="My awesome new post title".

BOOM, your all new post markdown file is created under _posts folder.

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.

Contributing

If you made a awesome kick-ass change, and believe it would be awesome to up, made a pull-request in up repository!

I’ll be proud to accept your contributions.

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, holman (from left), plusjade (from jekyll-bootstrap) or fat and mdo (from bootstrap) credit somewhere on your all-new blog or tweet a shout out to us, well hey, sure we’ll take it.