al-folio
A simple and clean Jekyll theme for academics.
Originally, al-folio was based on the *folio theme (published by Lia Bogoev and under the MIT license). Since then, it got a full re-write of the styles and many additional cool features. The emphasis is on whitespace, transparency, and academic usage: theme demo.
Getting started
For more about how to use Jekyll, check out this tutorial. Why Jekyll? Read this blog post!
Installation
Assuming you have Ruby and Bundler installed on your system (hint: for ease of managing ruby gems, consider using rbenv), first fork the theme from github.com:alshedivat/al-folio
to github.com:<your-username>/<your-repo-name>
and do the following:
$ git clone git@github.com:<your-username>/<your-repo-name>.git
$ cd <your-repo-name>
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec jekyll serve
Now, feel free to customize the theme however you like (don't forget to change the name!). After you are done, commit your final changes. Now, you can deploy your website to GitHub Pages by running the deploy script:
$ ./bin/deploy [--user]
By default, the script uses the master
branch for the source code and deploys the webpage to gh-pages
.
The optional flag --user
tells it to deploy to master
and use source
for the source code instead.
Using master
for deployment is a convention for user and organization pages.
Note: when deploying your user or organization page, make sure the _config.yml
has url
and baseurl
fields as follows.
url: # should be empty
baseurl: # should be empty
Note: unless it's a custom URL, then update it on the url
field.
Usage
Note that _pages/about.md
is built to index.html in the published site. There is therefore no need to have a separate index page for the project. If an index page does exist in the root directory then this will prevent _pages/about.md
from being added to the built site.
Features
Collections
This Jekyll theme implements collections to let you break up your work into categories. The example is divided into news and projects, but easily revamp this into apps, short stories, courses, or whatever your creative work is.
To do this, edit the collections in the
_config.yml
file, create a corresponding folder, and create a landing page for your collection, similar to_pages/projects.md
.
Two different layouts are included: the blog layout, for a list of detailed descriptive list of entries, and the projects layout. The projects layout overlays a descriptive hoverover on a background image. If no image is provided, the square is auto-filled with the chosen theme color. Thumbnail sizing is not necessary, as the grid crops images perfectly.
Theming
Six beautiful theme colors have been selected to choose from.
The default is purple, but quickly change it by editing $theme-color
variable in the _sass/variables.scss
file (line 72).
Other color variables are listed there, as well.
Social media previews
The al-folio theme optionally supports preview images on social media.
To enable this functionality you will need to set serve_og_meta
to true
in
your _config.yml
. Once you have done so, all your site's pages will include
Open Graph data in the HTML head element.
You will then need to configure what image to display in your site's social
media previews. This can be configured on a per-page basis, by setting the
og_image
page variable. If for an individual page this variable is not set,
then the theme will fall back to a site-wide og_image
variable, configurable
in your _config.yml
. In both the page-specific and site-wide cases, the
og_image
variable needs to hold the URL for the image you wish to display in
social media previews.
License
The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.