Minimal Mistakes

Minimal Mistakes is a two column responsive Jekyll theme perfect for powering your GitHub hosted blog.

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.
Custom 404 page to get you started.
Stylesheets for Pygments and Coderay syntax highlighting to make your code examples look snazzy.

General notes and suggestions for customizing Minimal Mistakes.

Basic Setup

Install Jekyll if you haven't already.
Fork the Minimal Mistakes repo
Clone the repo you just forked to your computer.
Edit _config.yml to personalize your site.
Check out the sample posts in _posts to see examples for pulling in large feature images, tags, and other YAML data.
Read the documentation below for further customization pointers and documentation.

Demo the Theme

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.

Setup for an Existing Jekyll site

Clone the following folders: _includes, _layouts, assets, and images.
Clone the following files and personalize content as need: about.md, articles.html, index.md, feed.xml, sitemap.xml
Set the following variables in your config.yml file:

title:            Site Title
description:      Describe your website here.
disqus_shortname: shortname
url:              http://your-website.com

# Owner/author information
owner:
  name:           Your Name
  avatar:         avatar.jpg
  bio:            "Your bio goes here. It shouldn't be super long but a good two sentences or two should suffice."
  email:          you@email.com
  # Social networking links used in footer. Update and remove as you like.
  twitter:        
  facebook:       
  github:         
  stackexchange:  
  linkedin:       
  instagram:      
  flickr:         
  tumblr:         
  # For Google Authorship https://plus.google.com/authorship
  google_plus:    

# Analytics and webmaster tools stuff goes here
google_analytics:   
google_verify:      
# https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/configure/verify/ownership Option 2 content= goes here
bing_verify:         

# Links to include in top navigation
# For external links add external: true
links:
  - title: Theme Setup
    url: /theme-setup
  - title: External Link
    url: http://mademistakes.com
    external: true

# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
timezone:    America/New_York
future:      true
pygments:    true
markdown:    kramdown

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. And if you make something cool with this theme feel free to let me know.

License

This theme is free and open source software, distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. So feel free to use this Jekyll theme on your site without linking back to me or including a disclaimer.

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Minimal Mistakes