Holo Alfa Jekyll theme

This project is no longer maintained. It will probably still work fine though.

Holo Alfa is a minimalist, mobile first Jekyll theme with focus on readability and content. Created for free and fun by Stijn. Also works great as a base to build your own theme on.

Feature highlights

  • Mobile first design
  • Extensive content styling
  • Responsive video's (using FitVids.JS)
  • Support for authors and guest authors
  • Read time on articles
  • Disqus comments
  • Language localization
  • Automatic og metadata
  • Automatic archive page (without plugins)
  • Automatic sitemap en RSS feed
  • Contact page (with working email form)
  • A lot of (optional) customization options (all in _config.yml)

And much more.

Getting started

If you're new to Jekyll, check out http://jekyllrb.com/ and read up on Jekyll. It's worth it.

Installing

As simple as forking the repository, and then clone it so you can edit the files locally.

Configuration

Edit _config.yml!

You can find _config.yml in your site's root directory. This configuration file contains some necessary settings and some optional customization settings. All settings are explained in _config.yml itself. Also make sure to use the developement configuration file (_config_dev.yml) for running your site locally. This way you don't get your URLs mixed up.

There are some customizations that can't be done in _config.yml. These include:

  • Editing the About, Contact and Archive page.
  • Adding or removing pages from the navigation. This can be done in \_includes\navigation.html.
  • The "thanks" page after a message has been send through the contact page: thanks.md
  • The gradient on cover images: \_includes\gradient.css (this is explained in _config.yml).

Also make sure to replace the placeholder favicons and the \img\og-image.jpg with your own.

Start the Jekyll server

You can learn how to do this by reading this.

Tip: to run your site locally with _config_dev.yml as configuration file, use this command at the root of your site bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config_dev.yml.

When everything is OK, your site should now be available at http://localhost:4000.

That's it.

GitHub