Austin T. Boyd

Austin T. Boyd

Statistics and Evaluation Consultant

Personal Website with Minimal Mistakes Jekyll Theme HOWTO - Part II

This is Part II of the website HOWTO series. See Part I on Docker, Part III on deployment with GitHub pages and Part IV on SEO and analytics.

   

This website is built with Jekyll using Minimal Mistakes theme and hosted on GitHub Pages. For development and writing posts I use Docker that builds a static website locally and serves it from a Docker container. I then push the local changes upstream to GitHub which then builds the website on GitHub’s servers.

In this second HOWTO serie, I explain most of the changes I made to the Minimal Mistakes theme. So if you like how this site looks, it will save you long hours of tweaking and experimenting!

When working on my customization, I found these MM documentation links particularly useful:

Tip: You can find these posts in your project to see the raw code and learn from there.

HOW TO CHANGE AVATAR FROM ROUND TO SQUARE?

  • Navigate to _sidebar.scss
  • Find img
  • Increasing border-radius makes it eclipse. Change to 0% if you want the square shape. padding and border are responsible for frame around your avatar. I don’t like it, so set to 0px.
img {
    max-width: 200px;
    border-radius: 0%;

    @include breakpoint($large) {
      padding: 0px;
      border: 0px solid $border-color;
    }
  }

HOW TO CHANGE SIZE OF AVATAR?

  • Navigate to _sidebar.scss
  • Find img
  • Change max-width, e.g. from 200px to 180px

HOW TO CHANGE SIZE OF AUTHOR BIO AND MAKE IT ITALIC?

  • Navigate to _sidebar.scss
  • Find .author__bio
  • Add font-size and font-style, e.g.:
.author__bio {
  margin: 0;
  font-size: 0.9em;
  font-style: italic;

  @include breakpoint($large) {
    margin-top: 10px;
    margin-bottom: 20px;
  }
}

HOW TO CHANGE LOOK OF PHOTO CREDIT IN HEADER?

  • Navigate to _page.scss
  • Find .page__hero-caption
  • I changed the font-size to 0.6em and opacity to 0.4 here

HOW TO CHANGE LOOK OF TITLE IN HEADER?

  • Navigate to _page.scss
  • Find .page__title
  • I tweaked text-shadow here:
    .page__title,
    .page__meta,
    .page__lead,
    .btn {
      color: #fff;
      text-shadow: 3px 3px 4px rgba(#000, 0.8);
    }
  • Navigate to your skin (e.g. _contrast.scss)
  • Change $link-color. I opted for LinkedIn color:
$link-color: #007bb6 !default;

HOW TO CHANGE SIZE OF POST TITLE ON HOME PAGE?

  • Navigate to _archive.scss
  • Add font-size to .archive__item, e.g.:
.archive__item {
  position: relative;
  font-size: 0.8em;

HOW TO CHANGE FONT TYPE EVERYWHERE?

  • Navigate to _variables.scss
  • Find $global-font-family
  • Change it to one specified earlier in that section or add a new one e.g.
$global-font-family: $helvetica, Arial !default;

HOW TO CHANGE FONT SIZE IN POSTS?

  • Navigate to _page.scss
  • Find .page__content
  • Change p,a,li,dl font-size from 1em to e.g. 0.9em to make it smaller
  p,
  li,
  dl {
    font-size: 0.8em;
  }

HOW TO CHANGE MARGINS BETWEEN HEADERS/PARAGRAPHS?

  • Navigate to _base.scss
  • Change headers margin (h1,h2,h3,h4…) on the top from 2em to 1.3em
  • Change paragraphs (p) margin-bottom from 1.3em to 1.5em

HOW TO DELETE CALENDAR ICON IN POSTS DATE?

  • Navigate to single.html
  • Find class="page__date"
  • And delete:
<i class="fas fa-fw fa-calendar-alt" aria-hidden="true">

HOW TO MAKE POST DATE APPEAR AFTER THE TITLE?

  • Navigate to single.html
  • Move the following code from <footer> to <header>:

{% if page.last_modified_at %}
  <p class="page__date"><strong>{{ site.data.ui-text[site.locale].date_label | default: "Updated:" }}</strong> <time datetime="{{ page.last_modified_at | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}">{{ page.last_modified_at | date: "%B %d, %Y" }}</time></p>
{% elsif page.date %}
  <p class="page__date"><strong>{{ site.data.ui-text[site.locale].date_label | default: "Updated:" }}</strong> <time datetime="{{ page.date | date_to_xmlschema }}">{{ page.date | date: "%B %d, %Y" }}</time></p>
{% endif %}

(Optional)

Delete “Updated:” from single.html and from ui-text.yml (called date_label)

HOW TO MAKE SHARE BUTTONS APPEAR AFTER THE TITLE ON TOP OF THE PAGE?

  • Navigate to single.html
  • Move this code from footer to header:

{% if page.share %}{% include social-share.html %}{% endif %}

Few more nicities for the look of share buttons and we are done.

  • Navigate to social-share.html
  • Delete the first if Liquid block with h4 page__share-title
  • Delete the words Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook in between <span></span> tags
  • Navigate to _page.scss
  • Find .page__share
  • Delete border-top, padding-top and margin-top

HOW TO DELETE PAGINATION IN POSTS?

These are the buttons “previous”/“next”

  • Navigate to single.html
  • Delete {% include post_pagination.html %}

HOW TO CHANGE WIDTH OF CONTENT IN POSTS?

My MacBook Pro has dimensions larger than $max-width specified in _page.scss like so:

@include breakpoint($x-large) {
    max-width: $max-width;
  }

$max-width currently is 1280px and lives in _variables.scss. I have increased it to 1400px to have more space for content.

HOW TO CHANGE CODE HIGHLIGHTING?

There are two ways to highlight code:

WAY 1


{% highlight html linenos %}
some code
{% endhighlight %}

WAY 2

Just use markdown for block of code:

  
    ``` python
    Your block of code here
    ```

In both cases, the colors to use are specified in your skin. For instance, contrast skin uses these colors, which you can find in _contrast.scss:

/* contrast syntax highlighting (base16) */
$base00: #000000;
$base01: #242422;
$base02: #484844;
$base03: #6c6c66;
$base04: #918f88;
$base05: #b5b3aa;
$base06: #d9d7cc;
$base07: #fdfbee;
$base08: #ff6c60;
$base09: #e9c062;
$base0a: #ffffb6;
$base0b: #a8ff60;
$base0c: #c6c5fe;
$base0d: #96cbfe;
$base0e: #ff73fd;
$base0f: #b18a3d;

Tip: You can specify colors from another skin. Or check other base16 colors.

You also have base16 in the _variables.scss where they are specified as default colors

Note: If you have Liquid syntax in your code block, don’t forget to wrap it into raw/endraw tags or it won’t be displayed otherwise.

HOW TO CHANGE FONT SIZE/FONT TYPE OF CODE?

To change size/background color of inline code highlighted with `` (backticks):

  • Navigate to _base.scss
  • Change font-size in this part of code :
p > code,
a > code,
li > code,
figcaption > code,
td > code {
  padding-top: 0.1rem;
  padding-bottom: 0.1rem;
  font-size: 0.9em;

To change font type and font size of code blocks:

tt,
code,
kbd,
samp,
pre {
  font-family: $monospace;
  font-size: 0.9em;
}

HOW TO CHANGE LINE HIGHT IN HIGHLIGHTED CODE?

  • Navigate to _syntax.scss
  • Find div.highlighter-rouge
  • Change line-height

HOW TO CREATE TAGS ARCHIVE?

  • Create tags/tag-archive.md with this content:
---
title: "Posts by Tag"
permalink: /tags/
layout: tags
author_profile: true
---
  • Navigate to 0.0.0.0:4000/tags/ in your browser to see tags archive.

Note: Make sure that the following code is uncommented in your _config.yml:

tag_archive:
  type: liquid
  path: /tags/

HOW TO CREATE POSTS BY YEAR ARCHIVE?

  • Add to navigation.yml another nav link, e.g.
  - title: "Archive"
    url: /year-archive/
  • Create year-archive.md with this content:
---
title: "Posts by Year"
permalink: /year-archive/
layout: posts
author_profile: true
---

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