New Theme: Minimal Mistakes

I’m moving to a new theme, Minimal Mistakes.

I don’t like the default github themes because they’re missing basic things like sidebars and displaying post titles. These can be added (because it’s all code nothing is impossible), but it requires modifying a theme’s _layout and locking you into a theme, but theme flexibility is the point of using a built-in theme.

Github has recently-ish (11/2017) added shared themes a.k.a remote themes, allowing specially-built themes stored in github to be used by reference in your _config.yaml.

I chose Minimal Mistakes because it looked good and didn’t need any customization in _layouts (none in my case) and minimal configuration.

Some of the steps I needed to do to incorporate it:

• Changes to _config.yml
  • added required new plugins
  • defaults for posts
  • Added sidebar links and avatar that links to my Gravatar page
  • Declarations for pagination, breadcrumbs,
  • Include for _pages dir to get it processed
• created _pages/category-archive.md and _pages/tags-archive.md to generate pages with tags and categories
• removed layout: post from front matter in every post (now defaulted in _config.yml)
• Added a lot of defaults for posts and pages in _config.yml
• Removed all customizations from _layouts
• Moved about.md to _pages and fixed the permalink in the file
• Created _data/navigation.yml to set up a menubar
• Changed index.html to have “important” front matter, the key being layout: home. Until I added this the homepage didn’t work.
• Add a header image and configure header code in index.html front matter

It looks like a lot of steps, but was a good learning experience for Jekyll and a lot of these steps were because I was porting from another theme.

I will be labeling the merge to master branch so I can easily find the changes, but for now all changes are made on the branch minimal-mistakes.