Why a new Jekyll theme?
When I set out to choose a theme for my revamped personal blog, I hoped for something with a book-like literary feeling. So first I keyed in a search for jekyll literary theme.
This turned up dozens of grade school guides to understanding the themes and motifs of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Whoops!
Next I searched for jekyll literary theme CSS. This turned up results including
tufte-jekyll
and
tufte-css-jekyll.
Now we’re talking!
But unfortunately, both of these themes are classic-style Jekyll themes, where the installation process is to spew the theme files all over your site folder. I wanted a clean separation between the theme files and my own site files, which can only be done with a gem-packaged theme.
First I began to wrap tufte-css-jekyll with gem packaging. Then I found a few things here and there that I wanted to tweak. I didn’t like the look of the navbar angle brackets. The <hr> in the footer felt slightly off. I wanted a blog post list page that shows only titles, not excerpts.
Before I knew it, this had turned into a proper yak shave, but I’m pretty happy with the results! Origins of the term yak shaving via the MIT AI lab See also the famous Malcom in the Middle scene