Use prose.io to add or edit files instead of doing it directly on GitHub, it can be a little easier that way.
If you want to enable comments on your site, Beautiful Jekyll supports the Disqus comments plugin. To use it, simply sign up to Disqus and add your Disqus shortname to the disqus parameter in the _config.yml.
If the disqus parameter is set in the configuration file, then all blog posts will have comments turned on by default. To turn off comments on a particular blog post, add comments: false to the YAML front matter. If you want to add comments on the bottom of a non-blog page, add comments: true to the YAML front matter.
Beautiful Jekyll lets you easily add Google Analytics to all your pages. This will let you track all sorts of information about visits to your website, such as how many times each page is viewed and where (geographically) your users come from. To add Google Analytics, simply sign up to Google Analytics to obtain your Google Tracking ID, and add this tracking ID to the google_analytics parameter in _config.yml.
These are the main parameters you can place inside a page's YAML front matter that Beautiful Jekyll supports.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| layout | What type of page this is (recommended options are page, post, or minimal) |
| title | Page or blog post title |
| subtitle | Short description of page or blog post |
| comments | If you want do add Disqus comments to a specific page, use comments: true. Comments are automatically enabled on blog posts, to turn comments off for a specific post, use comments: false. Comments only work if you set your Disqus id in the _config.yml file. |
| js | List of local JavaScript files to include in the page (eg. /js/mypage.js) |
| ext-js | List of external JavaScript files to include in the page (eg. //cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/underscore.js/1.8.2/underscore-min.js) |
| css | List of local CSS files to include in the page |
| ex-css | List of external CSS files to include in the page |
| googlefonts | List of Google fonts to include in the page (eg. ["Monoton", "Lobster"]) |
| fb-img | If you want to share a page on Facebook, by default Facebook will use the first image it can find on the page. If you want to specify an image to use when sharing the page on Facebook, then provide the image's URL here |
Beautiful Jekyll automatically generates a simple RSS feed of your blog posts, to allow others to subscribe to your posts. If you want to add a link to your RSS feed in the footer of every page, find the rss: false line in _config.yml and change it to rss: true.
I wrote a blog post describing some more advanced features that I used in my website that are applicable to any Jekyll site. It describes how I used a custom URL for my site (deanattali.com instead of daattali.github.io), how to add a Google-powered search into your site, and provides a few more details about having an RSS feed.
Beautiful Jekyll is meant to be so simple to use that you can do it all within the browser. However, if you'd like to develop locally on your own machine, that's possible too if you're comfortable with command line. Folow these simple steps to do that with Vagrant:
- Install VirtualBox and Vagrant
- Clone your fork
git clone git@github.com:yourusername/yourusername.github.io.git - Inside your repository folder, run
vagrant up - View your website at
http://0.0.0.0:4000on *nix orhttp://127.0.0.1:4000on Windows. - Commit any changes and push everything to the master branch of your GitHub repository. GitHub Pages will then rebuild and serve your website automatically.
The following front matter was used by the original beautiful-jekyll theme.
layout: post
title: Test markdown
subtitle: Each post also has a subtitle
- If you have a project page and you want a custom 404 page, you must have a custom domain. See https://help.github.com/articles/custom-404-pages/. This means that if you have a regular User Page you can use the 404 page from this theme, but if it's a website for a specific repository, the 404 page will not be used.