whiteglass is a minimal, responsive Jekyll theme for hackers.

Installation

Add this line to your Jekyll site’s Gemfile:

gem "jekyll-whiteglass"

And add this line to your Jekyll site’s _config.yml:

theme: jekyll-whiteglass

And then execute:

bundle

Or install it yourself as:

gem install jekyll-whiteglass

Quick Start

  1. Go to yous/whiteglass-template.
  2. Click “Use this template” button, and then create a repository.
  3. Change the options defined in _config.yml. See Configuration section under whiteglass-template.
  4. Push some content, then GitHub Actions will generate the site.

Manual Setup

  1. Generate a new Jekyll blog:

    jekyll new blog --skip-bundle
cd blog

  2. Edit Gemfile to use whiteglass theme:

    gem "jekyll-whiteglass"

  3. Edit _config.yml to use whiteglass theme and its plugins:

    theme: jekyll-whiteglass
plugins:
  - jekyll-archives
  - jekyll-paginate
  - jekyll-sitemap

permalink: /:year/:month/:day/:title/
paginate_path: /posts/:num/
paginate: 5

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

  4. Copy index.html, about.md, archives.md, feed.xml, robots.txt, _data/i18n.yml, and _data/navigation.yml from the theme:

    rm index.md
curl -L -O "https://github.com/yous/whiteglass/raw/master/{index.html,about.md,archives.md,feed.xml,robots.txt}"
curl -L --create-dirs -o _data/#1 "https://github.com/yous/whiteglass/raw/master/_data/{navigation.yml,i18n.yml}"

  5. Install gems and you’re good to go! The blog will be available on http://127.0.0.1:4000.

    bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Upgrading

From Version < 1.9.1

Copy _data/i18n.yml from the theme.

Deployment to GitHub Pages using Travis CI

This theme uses jekyll-archives gem which is not supported by GitHub Pages. If you want to use full features like categories and tags, I recommend you to use Travis CI or other CI services.

To deploy using Travis CI, first copy the .travis.yml of this repository. You can change target-branch (gh-pages by default) and on.branch (master by default) as you want. If you want further customization, see Travis CI’s documentation page.

You’ll see there’s github-token: $GITHUB_TOKEN, and this is what you should configure. Go to your personal access tokens page, and generate new token with public_repo or repo permission as you need. Then go to Travis CI’s settings page of your repository, and add a new environment variable GITHUB_TOKEN with the value of the token you generated.

Usage

Customization

To override the default structure and style of whiteglass, simply create the concerned directory at the root of your site, copy the file you wish to customize to that directory, and then edit the file. e.g., to override the _includes/footer_content.html file to add contents to footer, create an _includes directory, copy _includes/footer_content.html from jekyll-whiteglass gem folder to <your-site>/_includes and start editing that file.

For example, you can add favicons to _includes/head_custom.html:

<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="76x76" href="/apple-touch-icon-76x76.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="120x120" href="/apple-touch-icon-120x120.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="152x152" href="/apple-touch-icon-152x152.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png">

The site’s default CSS is in the gem itself, assets/main.scss. To override the default CSS, the file has to exist at your site source. Do either of the following:

  • Create a new instance of main.scss at site source
    • Create a new file main.scss at <your-site>/assets/
    • Add the frontmatter dashes, and
    • Add @import "whiteglass";, to <your-site>/assets/main.scss
    • Add your custom CSS
  • Download the file from this repo
    • Create a new file main.scss at <your-site>/assets/
    • Copy the contents at assets/main.scss onto the main.scss you just created, and edit away
  • Copy directly from jekyll-whiteglass gem
    • Go to your local jekyll-whiteglass gem installation directory (run bundle show jekyll-whiteglass to get the path to it)
    • Copy the assets/ folder from there into the root of <your-site>
    • Change whatever values you want, inside <your-site>/assets/main.scss

Locale

site.lang is used to declare the primary language for each web page within the site.

lang: en-US sets the lang attribute for the site to the United States flavor of English, while en-GB would be for the United Kingdom style of English. Country codes are optional and the shorter variation lang: en is also acceptable. You may want to write a post in different language, then add lang attribute to the frontmatter of that post:

layout: post
title: "안녕하세요"
lang: ko

The date format and other fixed strings are translated using the _data/i18n.yml file. If your language is not yet included, feel free to open a pull request.

Description

site.description describes the site. This is mainly used in meta descriptions for improving SEO. Also, you can set description attribute for each post:

layout: post
title: Awesome Post
description: This is an awesome post.

If you don’t specify post.description, then post.excerpt will be used if it exist.

External URL

external-url turns the title of your post to a link. Specify a URL which you want to link to.

layout: post
title: Jekyll whiteglass theme
external-url: https://github.com/yous/whiteglass

Then the title of your post would look like a link with text Jekyll whiteglass theme →. This also applies to your blog feed.

Category

Each post can have categories attribute. It can be a string or an array. This will be displayed on index, archive and each post, and provide a link to the archive of category.

layout: post
title: Awesome Post
categories: Misc

layout: post
title: Another Awesome Post
categories:
  - Misc
  - Idea

Tag

Each post can have tags attribute. It can be a string or an array. This will be displayed on index, archive and each post, and provide a link to the archive of tag.

layout: post
title: Awesome Post
tags: food

layout: post
title: Another Awesome Post
tags:
  - food
  - trip

Feed

Create <your-site>/feed.xml with:

---
layout: feed
---

If you want to use another path for feed, you can specify a non-default path via your site’s config.

feed:
  path: atom.xml

Then create <your-site>/atom.xml with the same content of feed.xml above.

Comments

whiteglass provides the ability to include your favourite commenting service, like Disqus or Isso.

To enable comments on pages and posts:

  1. Overwrite the _includes/custom_comments_provider.html with your custom provider of comments.
  2. Add comments: true to your _config.yml.

To disable comments on certain pages or posts specify comments: false in the front matter of the page or post.

Metadata for SEO

Keywords

Each post can have keywords attribute. This is a comma-separated list which is used in meta descriptions for improving SEO.

layout: post
title: How to configure jekyll-whiteglass
keywords: jekyll, whiteglass, github pages

YAML list is also available:

keywords:
  - jekyll
  - whiteglass
  - github pages

Twitter

  • site.twitter_username sets twitter:site and twitter:creator meta tag
  • site.twitter_image sets twitter:image:src meta tag
  • page.twitter_card.type sets twitter:card meta tag (default: summary)
    • If page.twitter_card.type is gallery, it sets twitter:image0, twitter:image1, twitter:image2 and twitter:image3 meta tags with page.twitter_card.image, page.twitter_card.image1, page.twitter_card.image2 and page.twitter_card.image3, respectively
    • If page.twitter_card.type is photo, page.twitter_card.width sets twitter:image:width meta tag and page.twitter_card.height sets twitter:image:height meta tag
  • page.twitter_card.creator sets twitter:creator meta tag. It overrides site.twitter_username
  • page.twitter_card.image sets twitter:image:src meta tag if page.twitter_card.type is not gallery. It overrides site.twitter_image

Facebook

  • site.facebook_app_id sets fb:admins meta tag
  • site.facebook_page sets article:author meta tag
  • site.facebook_image sets og:image meta tag
  • page.facebook.image sets og:image meta tag. It overrides site.facebook_image

To define header links, add titles and URLs under the main key in _data/navigation.yml:

main:
  - title: "About"
    url: /about/
  - title: "Archives"
    url: /archives/
  - title: "GitHub"
    url: https://github.com/yous/whiteglass

Enabling Google Analytics

To enable Google Analytics, add the following lines to your Jekyll site:

google_analytics: UA-NNNNNNNN-N

For Google Analytics 4, add the following lines:

google_analytics: G-NNNNNNNNNN

Replace Ns with your specific ID.