New Theme: Amber

Thanks to Stuart Webster for the awesome background! - CC-BY-2.0

As you may have noticed (unless you’re reading this through the RSS feed or a screen reader), this site has undergone a major theme update. I’m calling it “Amber”, because of the color choice. I took inspiration from various places on the web to come up with this design. This still uses the awesome Twitter Bootstrap under the hood. It just makes things too easy to build to get rid of.

My favorite feature, aside from the cleaned up navigation and better-looking site, is the per-post-backgrounds. This is accomplished with the code below. Pretty simple, if a bg element isn’t present (or set to false), the default background is shown, otherwise show the image specified in the bg YAML Front Matter item.

{% if page.bg %}
  <header style="background-image: url(/images/{{page.bg}});">
{% else %}
 <header style="background-image: url(/images/bg.jpg);">
{% endif %}

I’ve gotten rid of glyphicons in favor of FontAwesome. It’s way better to have just one icon-font library instead of two, faster page loads.

One of my favorite features (that was made before this theme was launched) is the compressed cache-busting asset-cruncher. The plugin is stupid, it takes all of your CSS, JS, and fonts from _assets, compresses what it can, then copies the compressed assets into assets that Jekyll uses to build the site. The result is a single CSS and a single JS file are used, brining the number of total requests down and site speed up. This is hugely helpful until HTTP/2 takes over everywhere. The plugin isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it really needs to be tuned up to run only when it’s supposed to. Right now, it doesn’t re-fire when Jekyll runs in --watch mode, meaning you have to CTRL+C and re-launch jekyll serve for CSS/JS updates to take effect on your local system. Merge requests are appreciated if you have the time.

As always, you can get the code to my site on GitLab and if you’d like to base your Jekyll site off of mine, you can do so easily with the deployable version.