# Beautiful Jekyll [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. ## Build your website in 3 steps Getting started is *literally* as easy as 1-2-3 :smile: ### 1. Fork this repository Fork this repository by clicking the Fork button on the top right corner. ### 2. Rename the repository to `yourusername.github.io` 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). ### 3. Customize settings 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. This 45-second GIF will show you how to go through the steps in real-time. It goes through the setup for a user with username `daattalitest`. Note that 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. ![Installation steps](img/install-steps.gif) ### Add your own content 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 front matter 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. ### Features #### Mobile-first 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. #### Personalization 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 #### Page types - 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. - 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. - To add a random page with minimal styling (ie. without the bulky navigation bar and footer), assign `layout: minimal`. - To write your own HTML page and completely bypass the Jekyll engine, simply omit the YAML front matter #### YAML front matter parameters ### Project page vs user page 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 `""`. ### Credits 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. ### Contributions If you find anything wrong or would like to contribute it any way, feel free to create a pull request/open an issue/send me a message. Any comments are welcome! ### Known bugs - 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.