Centrarium

A simple yet classy theme for your Jekyll website or blog. Customizable to fit your style or brand.

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Built with these awesome libraries:

  • Bourbon
  • Neat
  • Bitters
  • Refills
  • Font Awesome
  • HighlightJS
  • Lightbox

Features

This theme comes with a number of features, including:

  • Easily customizable fonts and colors
  • Cover images for your homepage and blog posts
  • Pagination enabled by default
  • Archiving of posts by categories and tags
  • Syntax highlighting for code snippets
  • Disqus integration for post comments
  • Lightbox for viewing full-screen photos and albums
  • Google Analytics with custom page name tracking
  • Social media integration (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub, and more)

Installation

If you're just getting started with Jekyll, you can use this repository as a starting point for your own site. Just download this project and add all the files to your project. Add your blog posts to the posts/ directory, and create your pages with the proper Jekyll front matter (see posts.html for an example).

If your site already uses Jekyll, follow these steps:

  1. Replace the files in the _includes, _layouts, and _sass directories with those from this project.
  2. Replace your index.html with the one from this project, and copy over the posts.html file as well.
  3. Copy the contents of the _config.yml from this project in to yours, and update the necessary information.

Don't forget to install Jekyll and other dependencies:

# cd into project directory
cd centrarium
# install Bundler if you don't have it already
gem install bundler
# install jekyll, jekyll-archives, jekyll-sitemap, and jekyll-paginate
bundle install

Updating Styles

If you want change the CSS of the theme, you'll probably want to check out these files in the _sass/ directory:

  • base/_variables.scss: Common values found throughout the project, including base font size, font families, colors, and more.
  • base/_typography.scss: Base typography values for the site (see typography.html for a demonstration)
  • _layout.scss: The primary styles for the layout and design of the theme.

Important Variables

Here are the important variables from base/_variables.scss you can tweak to customize the theme to your liking:

  • $base-font-family: The font-family of the body text. Make sure to @import any new fonts!
  • $heading-font-family: The font-family of the headers. Make sure to @import any new fonts!
  • $base-font-size: The base font-size. Defaults to $em-base from Bourbon (bourbon/settings/_px-to-em.scss).
  • $base-font-color: The color for the body text.
  • $action-color: The color for links in the body text.
  • $highlight-color: The color for the footer and page headers (when no cover image provided).

Configuration

All configuration options can be found in _config.yml.

Site Settings

  • title: The title for your site. Displayed in the navigation menu, the index.html header, and the footer.
  • subtitle: The subtitle of your site. Displayed in the index.html header.
  • email: Your email address, displayed with the Contact info in the footer.
  • name: Your name. Currently unused.
  • description: The description of your site. Used for search engine results and displayed in the footer.
  • baseurl: The subpath of your site (e.g. /blog/).
  • url: The base hostname and protocol for your site.
  • cover: The relative path to your site's cover image.
  • logo: The relative path to your site's logo. Used in the navigation menu instead of the title if provided.

Build Settings

  • markdown: Markdown parsing engine. Default is kramdown.
  • paginate: Number of posts to include on one page.
  • paginate_path: URL structure for pages.
  • inter_post_navigation: Whether to render links to the next and previous post on each post.

Archive Settings

Although this theme comes with a combined, categorized archive (see posts.html), you can enable further archive creation thanks to [jekyll-archives][archives]. Support for category and tag archive pages is included, but you can also add your own archive pages for years, months, and days.

To change archive settings, see the jekyll-archives section of _config.yml:

jekyll-archives:
  enabled:
    - categories
    - tags
  layout: 'archive'
  permalinks:
    category: '/category/:name/'
    tag: '/tag/:name/'

To fully disable the archive, remove the jekyll-archives section AND remove it from the gems list.

NOTE: the Jekyll Archive gem is NOT included with GitHub pages! Disable the archive feature if you intend to deploy your site to GitHub pages. Here is a guide on how you can use the jekyll archive gem with GitHub pages. The general gist: compile the Jekyll site locally and then push that compiled site to GitHub.

A sitemap is also generated using [jekyll-sitemap][sitemap].

Syntax Highlighting Settings

Inside of a post, you can enable syntax highlighting with the {% highlight <language> %} Liquid tag. For example:

{% highlight javascript %}
function demo(string, times) {
  for (var i = 0; i < times; i++) {
    console.log(string);
  }
}
demo("hello, world!", 10);
{% endhighlight %}

You can change the [HighlightJS theme][highlightjs_theme] in _config.yml:

highlightjs_theme: "monokai_sublime"

Disqus Settings

You can enable [Disqus][disqus] comments for you site by including one config option:

  • disqus_shortname: Your Disqus username. If the property is set, Disqus comments will be included with your blog posts.

If you want to disable Disqus for only a specific page, add disqus_disabled: true to the page's front matter.

Google Analytics Settings

You can enable basic [Google Analytics][ga] pageview tracking by including your site's tracking ID:

  • ga_tracking_id: The Tracking ID for your website. You can find it on your Google Analytics dashboard. If the property is set, Google Analytics will be added to the footer of each page.

Social Settings

Your personal social network settings are combined with the social sharing options. In the social section of _config.yml, include an entry for each network you want to include. For example:

social:
  - name: Twitter                         # Name of the service
    icon: twitter                         # Font Awesome icon to use (minus fa- prefix)
    username: TheBenCentra                # (User) Name to display in the footer link
    url: https://twitter.com/TheBenCentra # URL of your profile (leave blank to not display in footer)
    desc: Follow me on Twitter            # Description to display as link title, etc
    share: true                           # Include in the "Share" section of posts

Social Protocols

Using the Open Graph Protocol or Twitter Card metadata, you can automatically set the images and text used when people share your site on Twitter or Facebook. These take a bit of setup, but are well worth it. The relevant fields are at the end of the _config.yml file.

Also there is another protocol, the Open Source protocol, for saying where your site is hosted if the source is open. This helps develops more easily see your code if they are interested, or if they have issues. For more, see http://osprotocol.com.

Category Descriptions

You can enhance the posts.html archive page with descriptions of your post categories. See the descriptions section of _config.yml:

# Category descriptions (for archive pages)
descriptions:
  - cat: jekyll
    desc: "Posts describing Jekyll setup techniques."

Custom Page-Specific Javascript

You can add page-specific javascript files by adding them to the top-level /js directory and including the filename in the custom_js page's configuration file:

# Custom js (for individual pages)
---
layout: post
title:  "Dummy Post"
date:   2015-04-18 08:43:59
author: Ben Centra
categories: Dummy
custom_js:
- Popmotion
- Vue
---

The /js/ directory would contain the corresponding files:

$ ls js/
Popmotion.js Vue.js

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