Jekyll Theme Nixer
The even more barebones cousin of the barebones theme “Nix” for Jekyll, which doesn't need any dependencies except jekyll-redirect-from
, if you want to redirect pages. It is optimized for fast build speeds as well.
Its purpose is to be a hard-core minimalistic, single-author theme while not displaying anything more than just the content of posts and a list of posts.
It also changes as little as possible from the default browser settings to improve legibility.
It is meant for people, who are aware that nobody is using RSS feeds anymore. Either because they don't know what they are or how to use them, or they replaced Google Reader with Social Media. So all visitors are coming from search engines – let's be honest, Google – and won't read other posts, unless they are linked in the post itself.
And people coming from hacker news or related sites know how to change the URL in the browser's address bar.
If you think this goes too far, use the above mentioned Jekyll theme “Nix” instead.
Limited Features
- Dark mode, because we want to be respectful
- Posts, but no backlink to homepage
- No Pages, except custom error pages
- No visible authors, dates, categories, or tags on posts and pages
- No header or footer
- No pagination for the home page
- No feed.xml
- A sitemap.xml, because search engines should index us
- No semantic info like Open Graph, Twitter cards, JSON-LD, or Microdata
Feature Creep and Bloat
To have titles with proper spelling in the post list, you have to have a title
in your front matter. You can leave it out, but then some characters cannot be displayed, most notably the apostrophe ('
) or anything, which cannot reasonably put in the post's filename.
Rest assured, this is the only bloat, as we already removed the date with the rest from the front matter, because it can reliably taken from the post's filename. And who has time to post more than once a day, anyway.
Minutiae
Default Colors
The default browser link colors don't look great, if they're inverted in dark mode, just like white is inverted to black for the background:
- Link: #0000ee , inverted #ffff11
- Link visited: #551a8b , inverted #aae574
Therefore, they're set to somewhat lighter versions of the default colors.
- Link: #0000ee , inverted lightskyblue
- Link visited: #551a8b , inverted plum
Favicon
The favicon is currently icon.webp
for the light mode, and there's also a dark variant icon-dark.webp
.
Nixer?
“Nix” is the grammatically incorrect form of the German “nichts”, which in English means “nothing”. It's colloquially used to stress the nothingness. “Nixer” is the even more grammatically incorrect comparative of that, which colloquially may or may not being used at all.
Or, if you will, it could be UNIX without the “U”, because of the theme's somewhat archaic properties, but even more archaic.
Installation
Installation from Gem is recommended, but using a remote theme is also possible, even though it will increase build time a little, depending on your internet connection, because the theme will be downloaded during each build. Gems are installed locally.
GitHub pages gem users need to use the remote theme method.
Installation from Gem
Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile
:
gem "jekyll-theme-nixer"
And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml
:
theme: jekyll-theme-nixer
Make sure that this is the only theme:
in _config.yml
, and that there are no other remote-theme:
. Afterwards run bundle install
, and bundle update
to update it, if there's a new version.
bundle install
Installation as Remote Theme
Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile
:
gem "jekyll-remote-theme"
And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml
:
remote_theme: michaelnordmeyer/jekyll-theme-nixer
Make sure that this is the only remote_theme:
in _config.yml
, and that there are no other theme:
.
Finally, add jekyll-remote-theme
to your plugin section in _config.yml
as well.
Sitemap.xml
A sitemap.xml
is already included in the theme and doesn't need a dependency to the jekyll-sitemap
plugin. For a standard Jekyll installation, it works out-of-the-box if this files is copied to the Jekyll directory.
If hosted with the Github pages plugin, this plugin is already included and will automatically be used instead. To overwrite this, the file has to be copied manually from the theme's repository root to the site's repository root.