Minimal Mistakes

Jekyll is pretty rad and figured releasing a cleaned up version of my setup as a theme to hack up and use would be cool. So here be that theme --- I call it Minimal Mistakes, a responsive Jekyll theme with editorial tendencies.

Minimal Mistakes is all about:

• Responsive templates. Looking good on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
• Gracefully degrading in older browsers. Compatible with Internet Explorer 8+ and all modern browsers.
• Minimal embellishments. Content first --- other widget nonsense never.
• Large feature images for posts and pages.
• Simple and clear permalink structure (ie: domain.com/category/post-title)

General notes and suggestions for customizing Minimal Mistakes.

Basic Setup

1. Install Jekyll if you haven't already.
2. Fork the Minimal Mistakes repo
3. Make it your own and customize, customize, customize.

Pro-tip: Delete the gh-pages branch after cloning and start fresh by branching off master. There is a bunch of garbage in gh-pages used for the theme's demo site that I'm guessing you don't want on your site.

Preview the Theme

minimal-mistakes/
├── _includes
|    ├── author-bio.html  //bio stuff goes here
|    ├── browser-upgrade.html  //displays on IE8 and less
|    ├── footer.html  //site footer
|    ├── head.html  //site head
|    ├── navigation.html //site top nav
|    └── scripts.html  //jQuery, plugins, GA, etc.
├── _layouts
|    ├── home.html  //homepage layout
|    ├── page.html  //page layout
|    ├── post-index.html  //post listing layout
|    └── post.html  //post layout
├── _posts
├── assets
|    ├── css  //preprocessed less styles. good idea to minify
|    ├── img  //images and graphics used in css and js
|    ├── js
|    |   ├── main.js  //jQuery plugins and settings
|    |   └── vendor  //all 3rd party scripts
|    └── less 
├── images  //images for posts and pages
├── about.md  //about page
├── articles.md  //lists all posts from latest to oldest
└── index.md  //homepage. lists 5 most recent posts

Customization

_config.yml

Most of the variables found here are used in the .html files found in _includes if you need to add or remove anything. A good place to start would be to change the title, tagline, description, and url of your site. When working locally comment out url or else you will get a bunch of broken links because they are absolute and prefixed with {{ site.url }} in the various _includes and _layouts. Just remember to uncomment url when building for deployment or pushing to gh-pages...

Owner/Author Information

Change your name, bio, and avatar photo (100x100 pixels or larger), Twitter url, email, and Google+ url. If you want to link to an external image on Gravatar or something similiar you'll need to edit the path in author-bio.html since it assumes it is located in \images.

Including a link to your Google+ profile has the added benefit of displaying Google Authorship in Google search results if you've went ahead and applied for it. Don't have a Google+ account? Just leave it blank and/or remove <link rel="author" href="{{ site.owner.google_plus }}"> from head.html.

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Your Google Analytics ID goes here along with meta tags for Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools site verification.

Top Navigation Links

Edit page/post titles and URLs to include in the site's navigation. For external links add external: true.

# sample top navigation links
links:
  - title: About Page
    url: /about
  - title: Articles
    url: /articles
  - title: Other Page
    url: /other-page
  - title: External Page
    url: http://mademistakes.com
    external: true

Other Stuff

The rest is just your average Jekyll config settings. Nothing too crazy here...

_includes

For the most part you can leave these as is since the author/owner details are pulled from _config.yml. That said you'll probably want to customize the copyright stuff in footer.html to your liking.

Adding Posts and Pages

There are two main content layouts: post.html (for posts) and page.html (for pages). Both have large feature images that span the full-width of the screen, and both are meant for text heavy blog posts (or articles).

Feature Images

A good rule of thumb is to keep feature images nice and wide so you don't push the body text too far down. An image cropped around around 1024 x 256 pixels will keep file size down with an acceptable resolution for most devices. If you want to serve these images responsively I'd suggest looking at Picturefill or Adaptive Images.

The two layouts make the assumption that the feature images live in the images folder. To add a feature image to a post or page just include the filename in the front matter like so.

image:
  feature: feature-image-filename.jpg
  thumb: thumbnail-image.jpg #keep it square 200x200 px is good

The large texture images used in Minimal Mistakes are from Love Textures, probably a good idea to swap these out with your own photos...

If you want to apply attribution to a feature image use the following YAML front matter on posts or pages. Image credits appear directly below the feature image with a link back to the original source.

image:
  feature: feature-image-filename.jpg
  credit: Michael Rose #name of the person or site you want to credit
  creditlink: http://mademistakes.com #url to their site or licensing

Categories

In the sample _posts folder you may have noticed category: articles in the front matter. I like keeping all posts grouped in the same folder. If you decide to rename or add categories you will need to modify the permalink in articles.md along with the filename (if renaming).

For example. Say you want to group all your posts under blog/ instead of articles/. In your post add category: blog to the front matter, rename or duplicate articles.md to blog.md and change the permalink in that file to permalink: /blog/index.html.

If done correctly /blog should be a page listing all the site's posts.

Thumbnails for OG and Twitter Cards

Post and page thumbnails work the same way. These are used by Open Graph and Twitter Cards meta tags found in head.html. If you don't assign a thumbnail the default graphic (default-thumb.png) is used. I'd suggest changing this to something more meaningful -- your logo or avatar are good options.

Table of Contents

Insert the following HTML in post or page content that you want a table of contents to render. Kramdown will take care of the rest and convert all headlines into a contents list.

PS: The TOC is hidden on small devices because I haven't gotten around to optimizing it. For now it only shows on tablet and desktop breakpoints...

<section id="table-of-contents" class="toc">
  <header>
    <h3>Contents</h3>
  </header>
<div id="drawer" markdown="1">
*  Auto generated table of contents
{:toc}
</div>
</section><!-- /#table-of-contents -->

Videos

Video embeds are responsive and scale with the width of the main content block with the help of FitVids.

Not sure if this only effects Kramdown or if it's an issue with Markdown in general. But adding YouTube video embeds causes errors when building your Jekyll site. To fix add a space between the <iframe> tags and remove allowfullscreen. Example below:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/PWf4WUoMXwg" frameborder="0"> </iframe>

Twitter Cards

Twitter cards make it possible to attach images and post summaries to Tweets that link to your content. Summary Card meta tags have been added to head.html to support this, you just need to validate and apply your domain to turn it on.

Further Customization

To make things easier I use LESS to build Minimal Mistakes' stylesheets. If you want to make some minor cosmetic alterations, take a look at variables.less in assets/less/. Changing some of the following variables can help make the theme your own. Just compile main.less and ie.less using your preprocessor of choice and off you go -- I like CodeKit and Prepros.

// TYPOGRAPHY ================================================
@basefont: 'PT Serif', serif;
@baseheadingfont: 'PT Sans Narrow', sans-serif;
@codefont: Monaco, Courier New, monospace;

// COLOR ====================================================
@bodycolor      : #ebebeb;
@textcolor      : #333332;
@basecolor      : #343434;    
@compcolor      : spin(@basecolor, 180); 
@bordercolor    : @basecolor;
@white          : #fff;
@black          : #000;
@accentcolor    : @black;
/* Links ================================================= */
@linkcolor          : #343434;
@linkcolorhover     : darken(@linkcolor, 10);
@linkcolorvisited   : lighten(@linkcolorhover, 20);
@linkcolorfocus     : darken(@linkcolorvisited, 10);

Questions?

Having a problem getting something to work or want to know why I setup something in a certain way? Ping me on Twitter @mmistakes or file a GitHub Issue.

License

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

If you'd like give me credit somewhere on your blog or tweet a shout out to @mmistakes, that would be pretty sweet.