better-minima

Better-Minima is based on Minima which is Jekyll's default theme. Minima is a beautiful theme to begin with and has a clean look.

Better-Minima builds upon it by making the theme more suitable for a personal blog.

Theme preview

Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "better-minima"

And then execute:

$ bundle

This will fetch the gem and store it locally.

Then, to use this theme, change the theme variable in your _config.yml

theme: "better-minima"

If you want to host your Jekyll blog on GitHub, you need to follow the steps given below.

Add the gem jekyll-remote-theme to your Gemfile.

gem "jekyll-remote-theme"

Add the plugin jekyll-remote-theme to your plugins list in _config.yml

plugins:
  - jekyll-remote-theme

Add the theme name keshiba/better-minima to the remote-theme variable.

theme: minima
remote-theme: "keshiba/better-minima"

Run the bundle command to download and install the plugin

$ bundle

To get your name on the homepage as shown in this preview, add the following block to _config.yml

author:
  name: imarandomguy

To get the social links on your home page as shown in this preview, add the social_links block to better-minima config in _config.yml

better-minima:
  social_links:
    twitter: imarandomguy
    github: randomguy
    telegram: randomguy

For a list of all social links supported by this theme, take a look at this _config.yml file.

A list of Featured Posts are displayed on the homepage. To add a post to this list, set the featured variable to true.

---
title: "This is a featured post"
featured: true
---
Post content goes here

The "Recent Posts" section shows 10 recent posts (by default) in it. To change the recent posts count, add the following property to _config.yml.

recent_posts_count: 15

Unlike minima, better-minima shows just the Featured Posts and Recent Posts on the homepage. The "All Posts" section must be on a separate page for pagination to work correctly.

To enable pagination, follow the steps given below.

To _config.yml, add the following properties

paginate: 5
paginate_root_path: "/blog/"
paginate_path: "/blog/page:num/

paginate:5 - This enables pagination and instructs the theme to show 5 posts in a page.

paginate_root_path: "/blog/" - This is your preferred URL path to navigate to the "All Posts" section.

paginate_path: "/blog/page:num/ - This is the path used by Minima to navigate to other pages while paginating. :num is the placeholder for page number.

To _config.yml, add the plugin jekyll-plugins to the plugins block

plugins:
 - jekyll-paginate

Add gem dependency to Gemfile

gem 'jekyll-paginate', '>= 1.1.0

Create a new folder in your project's base directory with the name which you provided for paginate_root_path in _config.yml

For example, if your jekyll site is located at D:\Sites\MySite, then you should create the folder at D:\Sites\MySite\blog\

Download index.html into the folder which you created in Step-2.

This file will serve as the template for pagination and must be included exactly in the paginate_root_path.

Visit https://github.com/jekyll/minima

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/keshiba/better-minima. 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.

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