Coppermind
Coppermind is a one-column minimal responsive Jekyll blog theme.
Why Another Jekyll Theme?
The modern web is bloated and disorganised. Pages load slowly and require large, resource-hungry web browsers to acess them. The machines and networks of years ago would be entirely adequate today if the programs they run were better optimised. This project seeks to provide a simple, low-dependency framework for creation of static sites.
About
This project:
- Is built as a theme for Jekyll
- Was built on the now abandoned Monophase, but adds several features, updates, and fixes.
Installation and Initial Setup
Adding the gem
Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:
gem "coppermind"
And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:
theme: coppermind
And then execute:
bundle
Or install it yourself as:
gem install coppermind
The navigation bar and homepage
Before the site is fully functional, you will need to add an index.html file and navigation bar config files.
<!-- index.html -->
---
layout: home
---
To set up the navigation bar you need to specify titles and URLs in the file _data/navigation.yml. For example, the following will give you a navbar with an about page and three archive pages.
- title: About
url: /about/
- title: Years
url: /years/
- title: Categories
url: /categories/
- title: Tags
url: /tags/
You will also need to add markdown files corresponding to these links in the site's root directory:
<!-- about.md -->
---
layout: page
title: About
permalink: /about/
---
some text
<!-- categories.md -->
---
layout: archive
type: categories
title: Categories
permalink: /categories/
---
<!-- tags.md -->
---
layout: archive
type: tags
title: Tags
permalink: /tags/
---
<!-- years.md -->
---
layout: archive
type: years
title: Years
permalink: /years/
---
The footbar pins
To include pins in the footer, you need to specify titles, image names, and URLs in the file _data/pins.yml as shown in the example below.
- title: Larbs
url: https://larbs.xyz/
image: larbs
- title: XXIIVV
url: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html
image: xxiivv
- title: Luke Smith
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/index
image: luke
- title: Hundred Rabbits
url: https://100r.co/site/home.html
image: hundredrabbits
- title: Landchad
url: https://landchad.net/
image: landchad
- title: Kitchen
url: https://grimgrains.com/site/home.html
image: kitchen
This configuration corresponds to the following fiiles:
assets/pins/larbs.gifassets/pins/xxiivv.gifassets/pins/luke.gifassets/pins/hundredrabbits.gifassets/pins/landchad.gifassets/pins/kitchen.gif
Customisation
Config.yml options
In addition to the standard Jekyll config.yml settings, Coppermind supports the following:
| Variable | Type | Default | Specification |
|---|---|---|---|
paginate |
int | --- | The number of posts to include on the homepage |
title |
String | --- | The title of the website |
tagline |
String | --- | The tagline of the website |
lang |
String | en |
The language of pages; The value can be overwritten by the lang variable on each page |
author.name |
String | --- | The name of the website author |
author.url |
String | --- | A URL of the website author |
tags_path |
String | --- | A path to the archive-by-tags page; It is used by tags on each post |
categories_path |
String | --- | A path to the archive-by-categories page; It is used by categories on each post |
The default config is shown below:
<!-- config.yml -->
title: Coppermind
tagline: Your tagline here
author:
name: Author
# Build settings
markdown: kramdown
plugins:
- jekyll-feed
- jekyll-paginate
- jekyll-seo-tag
- kramdown-parser-gfm
paginate: 2
tags_path: /tags/
categories_path: /categories/
Page frontmatter
In addition to the standard Jekyll frontmatter configuration, Coppermind supports the following:
| Variable | Type | Default | Specification |
|---|---|---|---|
description |
String | --- | A description of the current post |
last_modified_at |
String | --- | The date of the last modification you made on a post after its publishing |
author |
String or Array | --- | The author name(s) of the post |
comments |
Boolean | true |
Does enable the Disqus comment system |
math |
Boolean | false |
Does enable MathJax on this page |
A sample post is shown below:
<!-- 2021-10-09-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown -->
---
layout: post
title: "Welcome to Jekyll!"
date: 2021-10-09 11:25:13 +1100
categories: jekyll update
tags: jekyll
---
some text
Homepage
You can customise the homepage by setting layout: home in the frontmatter in an index.html file in the base directory.
Custom Head
Coppermind leaves a placeholder to allow inserting custom HTML into the page head. HTML code in _includes/custom-head.html will be automatically included in <head>.
Alert Messages
Coppermind provides some predefined classes to specify different levels of alert messages. In order of tone from light to heavy, they are: message-info, message-warning, and message-danger. You may add it to single elements like a <p>, or to a parent if there are multiple elements to show.
Alignment
Coppermind also provides some predefined classes to specify the alignment of HTML elements—e.g. images. They are align-center, align-left, and align-right.
Development
To set up your environment to develop this theme, run bundle install. This theme is setup just like a normal Jekyll site with various filler files for testing. To test the theme, run bundle exec jekyll serve and open your browser at http://localhost:4000.
When a new gem version is released, only the files in specified in the gemspec regexp and tracked with Git will be bundled.
License
The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.