zachflower/no-style-please

A (nearly) no-CSS, fast, minimalist Jekyll theme.

no style, please!

A (nearly) no-CSS, fast, minimalist Jekyll theme. Inspired by elly's site, expressly created for my personal blog.

Try the demo out!

Features

• Fast (< 1kb of CSS, currently 955 bytes. For more information on performance and more, see Page Speed Insights report and Lighthouse report)
• Light, dark and auto modes
• Responsive
• Content first (typography optimized for maximum readability)
• SEO optimized (uses Jekyll SEO Tag)
• RSS feed (uses Jekyll Feed)
• Fully compatible with GitHub Pages (see GitHub Pages installation)

Installation

If you haven't already created your blog using Jekyll, follow the instructions to do so from Jekyll's documentation.

NOTE: if you are using Jekyll with GitHub Pages, see the GitHub Pages installation section.

Then, to style your blog with this theme, add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "no-style-please"

And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

theme: no-style-please

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install no-style-please

GitHub Pages installation

If you want to use this theme for your Jekyll's site deployed on GitHub Pages, follow the instructions on this page.

Usage

You can edit _config.yml file to customize your blog. You can change things such as the name of the blog, the author, the appearance of the theme (light, dark or auto), how dates are formatted, etc. Customizable fields should be straightforward to understand. Still, _config.yml contains some comments to help you understand what each field does.

For further customization (e.g. layout, CSS) see the official Jekyll's documentation on customizing gem-based themes.

Customize the menu

In order to add/edit/delete entries from the main menu, you have to edit the menu.yml file inside _data folder. Through that file you can define the structure of the menu. Take a look at the default configuration to get an idea of how it works and read on for a more comprehensive explanation.

The menu.yml file accepts the following fields:

• entries define a new unordered list that will contain menu entries
• each entry is marked by a - at the beginning of the line
• each entry has the following attributes:
  • title, which defines the text to render for that menu entry
  • url, which can either be a URL or false. If it is false, the entry will be rendered as plain text; otherwise the entry will be rendered as a link pointing to the specified URL. Note that the URL can either be relative or absolute.
  • post_list, which can be true or false. If it is true, the entry will have all posts in the site as subentries. This is used to render your post list.
  • entries, yes, you can have entries inside entries. In this way you can create nested sublists!

Pro tips

Dark mode for images

This theme provides dark mode by inverting all colors of light mode throught the CSS invert() function. This approach would also invert the color of all images, but, since this is not the behaviour one would expect, images are not inverted by default.

However, if you would like to force the color inversion on a specific image you can do so by applying class="ioda" to that image ("ioda" stands for "invert on dark appearance"). See the image in the overview post for an example of this approach. Note that color inversion will take place only when the theme has dark appearance!

For example, if you have a black and white image it could make sense to invert it in dark mode. On the other hand, a colorful image will probably look bad if inverted.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/riggraz/no-style-please. 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.

Development

To set up your environment to develop this theme, run bundle install.

Your theme is setup just like a normal Jekyll site! To test your theme, run bundle exec jekyll serve and open your browser at http://localhost:4000. This starts a Jekyll server using your theme. Add pages, documents, data, etc. like normal to test your theme's contents. As you make modifications to your theme and to your content, your site will regenerate and you should see the changes in the browser after a refresh, just like normal.

When your theme is released, only the files in _layouts, _includes, _sass and assets tracked with Git will be bundled. To add a custom directory to your theme-gem, please edit the regexp in no-style-please.gemspec accordingly.

License

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