Pole <!-- omit in toc -->

Pole is a one-column minimal responsive Jekyll blog theme.

One of the purposes of Pole is to be an alternative option to the default theme of Jekyll -- Minima. Pole is still keeping minimal, but meanwhile, more beautiful and mellow, and doesn't lose some useful basic features, such as archive.

Check the live demo.

Screenshot Light Screenshot Dark

Highlight Features <!-- omit in toc -->

Table of Contents <!-- omit in toc -->

Installation

Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "pole"

And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

theme: pole

And then execute:

bundle

Or install it yourself as:

gem install pole

You can also install the latest code via jekyll-remote-theme:

  1. Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

    gem "jekyll-remote-theme"

  2. Add these lines to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

    plugins:
  - jekyll-remote-theme

remote_theme: szivong/pole@main

Usage

Global Configuration

Variable Type Default Specification
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
disqus String --- Disqus short name
google_analytics String --- Google Analytics 4 Measurement ID

Post Configuration

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

Homepage

You can create a homepage for your blog by setting layout: home in your index.html.

Custom Head

Pole leaves a placeholder to allow defining custom head. All you need to do is putting data into _includes/custom-head.html, and they would be automatically included in <head>.

The navigation bar of Pole is configurable. You just need to specify titles and URLs in the file _data/navigation.yml, for example,

- title: About
  url: /about/
- title: Archive
  url: /archive/
- title: Categories
  url: /categories/

Pole allows you to show social links on the website. All you need to do is creating a file _data/social.yml, for example,

- title: Email
  url: mailto:[email protected]
  icon: fas fa-envelope
- title: Twitter
  url: https://twitter.com/szivong
  icon: fab fa-twitter
- title: GitHub
  url: https://github.com/szivong
  icon: fab fa-github

Alert Messages

Pole 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.

Google Analytics 4

To enable Google Analytics 4, you just need to set the Measurement ID in your _config.yml, for example,

google_analytics: G-XXXXXXX

Archive

Pole provides some built-in archive pages. It is implemented in pure Liquid. If you want to archive posts by years, you can create a page and put these code in it:

---
layout: archive
type: years
---

Similarly, if you want to archive posts by categories or tags, you can set the type property as categories or tags.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/szivong/pole. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

Development

To set up your environment to develop this theme, run bundle install.

Your theme is setup just like a normal Jekyll site! To test your theme, run bundle exec jekyll serve and open your browser at http://localhost:4000. This starts a Jekyll server using your theme. Add pages, documents, data, etc. like normal to test your theme's contents. As you make modifications to your theme and to your content, your site will regenerate and you should see the changes in the browser after a refresh, just like normal.

When your theme is released, only the files in _layouts, _includes, _sass and assets tracked with Git will be bundled. To add a custom directory to your theme-gem, please edit the regexp in pole.gemspec accordingly.

License

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.