About

Particular is a jekyll theme for personal websites.

It's best suited for hosting an interactive-resume site, but can easily be tweaked for lots of other purposes.

The theme is loosely built on pieces from freelancer, and imports the very cool particleground.js tool for its backgrounds.

If you have any questions or have a bug to report, please so so via the issues page.

Installation and setup

You will need ruby and bundler installed, just like for any other jekyll site. Ruby is probably already on your machine; instructions for installing bundler can be found here.

git clone https://github.com/ashtonmv/particular_theme.git
cd particular_theme
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

If you've installed everything correctly, this will start the local server. Visit localhost to view the site.

Configuration

My design principle for this theme was to make nearly everything editable via .yml files, because I find them super intuitive.

Basic Settings

The most fundamental settings for the theme are configured via _config.yml:

title: Particular
email: your@email.com
baseurl: ""
description: A clean, comfortable home for your resumé.
keywords: Web, Development, Software, Programmer, Coding, Resume, resume
meta_author: Your Name

# Build settings
markdown: kramdown
permalink: pretty

Other settings

Most other settings are configured via files under _data:

about.yml: configure image and text on the "About Me" page
formbutton.yml: create and configure a formspree formbutton for your site
nav-icons.yml: main navigation icons on all pages. Change these to showcase the internal/external pages you want.
particles.yml: styling options for the particleground backgrounds
resume.yml: data to fill in your "Resume" page

Styling

The best way to change the basic style of the theme is via _sass/head.scss, which contains the main Sass variables used in the theme's stylesheet (_sass/style.scss).

In addition to controlling the theme colors, _sass/head.scss is where custom fonts should be imported and where responsive CSS breakpionts can be controlled. The current breakpoints work well for most mobile devices and probably don't need to be changed (I hope).

Technically the theme also uses bootstrap, which is included via css/bootstrap.min.css.

HTML files

Even though it was my goal to shelter you from them, you will occasionally need to directly edit the HTML files under _includes. For example, if you want to include different fields in your resumé, or add some new JavaScript, you'll need to understand the HTML file layout.

Every page on the theme inherits its layout from _layouts/default.html, and only the content of the page depends on the specific url. Below are all of the HTML files that live in _includes, and a description of the urls for which they are included in _layouts/default.html.

404.html: included when url == /404 (or anything not found)
about.html: included when url == /about
formbutton.html: included everywhere (if _data/formbutton.yml has been appropriately configured)
head.html: included everywhere for metadata, stylesheets and JS imports
home.html: included when url == /
js.html: included everywhere (via head.html)
nav.html: included everywhere; just looks different when url == / or /404
particles.html: included everywhere to create particleground backgrounds
projects.html: included when url == /projects
resume.html: included when url == /resume
typewrite.html: included when url == /home or /404 for "typewriting" the text when nav-icon:hover

Adding your own content

Projects

You can manage your projects under projects/_posts. I've included 6 dummy projects in there that you can change or replace with your own projects. Unfortunately, the file naming convention for jekyll-based posts is quite strict (YYYY-MM-DD-title.md). Posts with different naming conventions will probably not show in this or any other theme.

Images

All images can be added to and imported from the img/ folder in the theme root. The only exception is favicon.ico, which lives in the theme root.

Resumé

You'll need to upload your resumé as a PDF file (under downloads/) so that visitors can download it using the button at the bottom of the /resume page.

I wish there was a good way to automatically render the HTML resume from this theme as a PDF, but so far I haven't found any.