Colophon

A minimal Jekyll theme for personal blogs: system-font serif typography, light/dark mode, an RSS feed, and a built-in ConvertKit signup form. No CSS framework, no JS framework, no web fonts — just a single small stylesheet.

Two layouts:

• Home — a single centered column with an avatar, a short bio, a flat list of posts, and a signup form.
• Post — a two-column layout (sticky sidebar + article) that collapses to a single column on narrower screens.

A working example lives in /demo.

• Serif body text / sans-serif UI using each OS's system fonts — no font downloads, fast first paint
• Light/dark mode toggle, respects prefers-color-scheme, persisted via localStorage
• RSS feed (jekyll-feed) and sitemap (jekyll-sitemap) generated automatically
• ConvertKit email signup form, no extra JavaScript embed required
• Per-post share links (Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn), generated at build time
• Responsive: the post layout's sidebar collapses under the article on mobile; the signup form and share links stack into full-width, single-column controls below 560px
• Zero JS dependencies beyond the theme toggle's few lines of vanilla JS

Add it to your own Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "jekyll-theme-colophon"

Or, to track the latest commit instead of a released version:

gem "jekyll-theme-colophon", git: "https://github.com/enderkus/jekyll-theme-colophon"

Then in _config.yml:

theme: jekyll-theme-colophon

plugins:
  - jekyll-feed
  - jekyll-sitemap

Run bundle install, then bundle exec jekyll serve.

If you'd rather not depend on a gem at all, you can also just fork this repo and use /demo directly as your site — copy its contents to your repo root along with _layouts/ and _includes/ from the theme root. That avoids the Bundler git-dependency indirection at the cost of not getting theme updates automatically.

All of these go in your site's _config.yml (see demo/_config.yml for a complete example):

• index.md — your home page bio (Markdown, rendered into the .bio block)
• _posts/*.md — standard Jekyll posts, YYYY-MM-DD-title.md, only title front matter is required (the post layout is applied automatically via defaults in _config.yml)
• assets/images/avatar.svg (or .jpg/.png) — your profile photo; update the <img> src in _layouts/home.html and _layouts/post.html if you change the filename or format
• favicon.svg — your site icon

1. In ConvertKit (Kit), go to Grow → Landing Pages & Forms and create a form.
2. Open the form's Embed settings and copy its Form ID (it appears in the embed code as forms/12345678/subscriptions).
3. Set convertkit.form_id in _config.yml to that ID.

The theme submits directly to ConvertKit's hosted form endpoint (_includes/signup.html), so no client-side JavaScript embed is needed. ConvertKit handles spam filtering server-side.

GitHub Pages' built-in Jekyll build only supports a fixed whitelist of themes/plugins and cannot build a site that depends on a custom theme gem. Use a GitHub Actions workflow instead — see .github/workflows/pages.yml for the one that builds and deploys /demo in this repo. Copy that workflow into your own site's repo (adjusting the working-directory if your site isn't in a demo/ subfolder), then enable Settings → Pages → Source: GitHub Actions.

bundle install               # theme gem's own dependencies
cd demo
bundle install                # pulls in the theme via the local `path: "../"` dependency
bundle exec jekyll serve

Edits to _layouts/, _includes/, or any file at the theme root are picked up by the demo site immediately since it references the theme via a local path, not a fetched gem.

Design and layout structure are inspired by pauldix.com.

MIT