[Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com/) is a simple site generator that is used for hosting [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com/) and specializes in blogging-type websites, although it can work with any site.
GitHub pages makes it extremely simple to host your own website or a website for a GitHub repository within minutes **for free**. While it's very easy to get started with GitHub Pages, you will get very basic looking pages and basic functionality.
**Beautiful Jekyll** is a ready-to-use template to make help you create an awesome Jekyll or GitHub Page website quickly. [Check out a demo](http://deanattali.com/beautiful-jekyll) of what you'll get after just two minutes or look at [my personal website](http://deanattali.com) to see it in use.
This will create a GitHub User page ready with the **Beautiful Jekyll** template that will be available at http://yourusername.github.io (sometimes it takes a few minutes).
Edit the `_config.yml` file to change all the settings to reflect your site. The settings in the file are fairly self-explanatory and I added comments inside the file to help you further. Every time you make a change to any file, your website will get rebuilt and should be updated at `yourusername.github.io` within a minute.
You can now visit your shiny new website, which will be seeded with several sample blog posts and a couple other pages.
**Note:** The GIF above goes through the setup for a user with username `daattalitest`. I only edited one setting in the `_config.yml` file in the video, but **you should actually go through the rest of the settings as well.**
To add pages to your site, you can either write a markdown file (`.md`) which will automatically get converted to HTML, or you can write an HTML file directly. It is much easier to write mardown; you write normal text with a few styling identifiers, and Jekyll will know how to automatically render it as a pretty HTML page. Markdown is extremely easy to use, just [look at the reference](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) and at some files on the site to get an idea.
Any markdown or HTML file you add to the root directory will be immediately available on your site. Take a look at the `aboutme.md` and `index.html` files as examples. Any file inside the `_posts` directory will be treated as a blog entry. You can look at the existing files there to get an idea of how to write blog posts, and delete them when you feel ready.
YAML is a way to use parameters to make the templating more useful. To take advantage of the template, you need to add [YAML front matter](http://jekyllrb.com/docs/frontmatter/) to the top of each page. If you don't want to use any special paramters, use the empty YAML front matter:
```
---
---
```
If you want to use any parameters, write them between the two lines. Look at `aboutme.md` or `index.html` as examples.
**Beautiful Jekyll** is designed to look great on both large-screen and small-screen (mobile) devices. Load up your site on your phone and your gigantic iMac, and the site will work well on both, though it will look slightly different.
Many personalization settings in `_config.yml`, such as setting your avatar to add a little image in the navbar or customizing what social media links to show in the footer
- **post** - To write a blog post, place a file in the `_posts` folder and assign `layout: post` in the YAML front matter. Look at the existing blog post files to see the YAML parameters that blog posts can use.
- **page** - To add a non-blog page, place it in the root directory and assign `layout: page` in the YAML front matter. Look at `aboutme.md` and `index.html` as examples.
- **minimal** - To add a random page with minimal styling (ie. without the bulky navigation bar and footer), assign `layout: minimal`.
If you're not sure what the difference is, then ignore this section.
If you want to use this theme for a project page for a specific repository instead of your main GitHub user page, that's no problem. The demo for this site ([daattali.github.io/beautiful-jekyll](http://deanattali.com/beautiful-jekyll)) is actually set up as a project page while my personal site ([daattali.github.io](http://deanattali.com)) is a regular user page. The only difference is that in the `_config.yml`, you should set `baseurl` to be `/projectname` instead of `""`.
This template was not made entirely from scratch. I would like to give special thanks to:
- [Barry Clark](https://github.com/barryclark) and his project [Jekyll Now](https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now), from whom I've taken several ideas and code snippets, as well as some documenation tips.
- [Iron Summit Media](https://github.com/IronSummitMedia) and their project [Bootstrap Clean Blog](https://github.com/IronSummitMedia/startbootstrap-clean-blog), from which I've used some design ideas and some of the templating code for posts and pagination.
If you find anything wrong or would like to contribute in any way, feel free to create a pull request/open an issue/send me a message. Any comments are welcome!
- If you have a project page and you want a custom 404 page, you must have a custom domain. See https://help.github.com/articles/custom-404-pages/. This means that if you have a regular User Page you can use the 404 page from this theme, but if it's a website for a specific repository, the 404 page will not be used.
