If you have any questions or feedback about the theme, don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for 1-to-1 support direct from the developers.
Copy the theme files to your website directory.
To run the theme locally, navigate to the theme directory in your terminal and run bundle install to install the theme's dependencies. Then run jekyll serve to start the Jekyll server.
If you're not familiar with how Jekyll works, check out jekyllrb.com for all the details, or read up on just the basics of front matter, writing posts, and creating pages.
Personal comes packed with lots of options to let you customize the theme.
The main things you might need to change here are:
site: Personal Jekyll Theme – change this to your website's name
paginate: 6 – change this to set the number of lab posts on each page
You can also change more advanced things here like the path names, collections etc. You do not need to change any of these to achieve the same look as the demo, so best to leave everything else unless you are confident.
You'll find this inside the _data folder – this is where you can set all of the theme options.
Basic settings
site_title – change this to your website's title. This shows up in the browser's title bar, and in the header and footer.
favicon_image – change this to the location of your favicon image, which shows up in the browser's title bar.
Header settings
logo_image – if you'd like to use a logo instead of plain text title in your header, enter the link to it here.
logo_width – set the width (in pixels) that your logo should appear at. This is useful for adding retina display support – for example if your original image is 400px wide, you could set this value to 200 to display a retina-ready image.
Menu settings
This allows you to set the links inside your menu. Add each one as a list item with a title and url. When hosting on GitHub Pages, make sure you leave a trailing / at the end of links to category pages (e.g. /lab/ or /projects/).
Footer settings
footer_tagline – sets the text that dispays underneath the site title/logo in the footer.
Hero settings
overlay_opacity – this sets the opacity of the overlay when you hover over grid items (portfolio and lab posts). Use a decimal value here, e.g. 0.8 will give you 80% opacity on hover.
Post settings
grid_spacing – this sets the amount of spacing (in pixels) between each image in an image grid layout.
Contact settings
The theme comes with a pre-made contact form that you can use with Formspree, which is free for up to 50 submissions per month. Please read through their website for instructions on how to set up your contact form. You could also easily adapt it to use another contact form service.
form_action – this is the action attribute that you get from FormSpree, for example https://formspree.io/[email protected]
confirmation_url – by default the user is shown a default Formspree thank you page. You can use this setting to provide an alternative URL for that page, for example /thanks – we have included a basic thank you page with the theme.
email_subject – choose the subject of the email you receive from Formspree.
send_button_text – change the text used on the form submit button.
Hint: you can add the contact form to any page of your site using the include – {% include contact-form.html %} – for example if you wanted to have the contact form on your About page.
Social settings
Here you can add links to your profiles on social networks, and they'll be shown in the footer. Simply add your URL next to the ones you want to show.
Color settings
Here you can set all the different colors used by the theme. Try them out and find the color pallette that works for you!
Font settings
font_embed – add an embed code from an external font service. This allows you to use services like Google Fonts or Typekit.
title_font – set the CSS name for the font used on titles.
body_font – set the CSS anme for the font used for body text.
regular_weight – set the font weight for regular styled text.
bold_weight – set the font weight for bold styled text.
Below these options, you'll see options for each typographical element used in the theme. For each, you can set the following options:
small_size – the size (in pixels) used for this element on small size screens like mobile phones.
medium_size – the size (in pixels) used for this element on medium size screens like tablets.
large_size – the size (in pixels) used for this element on largers screens like laptops and desktops.
weight – the font weight for this element.
letter_spacing – the letter spacing (in ems) for this element.
line_height – the line-height (in decimals) for this element.
Advanced options
ajax_loading – use true to enable Ajax loading throughout your site. Use false to disable it and load pages normally – this can be helpful if you're adding plugins or other javascript to your pages.
analytics_code – use this option to add your Google Analytics code.
custom_styles – use this option to add custom CSS styles to the theme.
header_js – use this option to insert javascript into the header of the page.
footer_js – use this option to insert javascript at the end of the page.
Inside the /images/ folder you'll find a few images included with the theme.
The images in the /demo/ subfolder are used in the demo project, post and page – you delete those if you don't need them.
favicon.png – you should replace this with the favicon image you'd like to use for your website.
social.jpg – this image is used by default as the meta image on the Home and lab pages. This shows up on social shares of your page, for example Facebook or Twitter – so you should change it to a relevant image, or change the image URL in that page's Front Matter (see below).
The theme comes with some pages set up ready for your content.
This is your website home page. You can edit some details in the Front Matter at the top of the page:
title – this sets the page title, which shows up in the browser's title bar and on search engine results, social shares etc.
description – this sets the page meta description, which shows up on search engine results, social shares etc.
featured_image – this sets the header image for the page, as well as the meta image, which shows up on social shares.
Below the Front Matter is the code for the page. You should edit this to set your title and intro text. Hint - the main
tag respects line breaks on tablet size screens and larger. This is useful if you want to prevent typographic widows.
This is the lab listing page, which shows all your lab posts. You can edit the same things as on the home page to customise it for your website.
These control the main content of your website, and are found inside the _projects, _posts and _pages folders.
Take a look at the demo content inside each folder for full descriptions on what you can do inside these, and to use as a template for your own content.
If you have any questions or feedback about the theme, don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for 1-to-1 support direct from the developers!
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