4DCu.be

Code for Sebastian Proost's blog about programming, gaming, technology, ...

Features

This theme comes with a number of features, including:

• Easily customizable fonts and colors
• Cover images for your homepage and blog posts
• Pagination enabled by default
• Archiving of posts by categories and tags
• Syntax highlighting for code snippets
• Lightgallery for viewing full-screen photos and albums
• Social media integration (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub, and more)
• Thumbnail generator
• Gallery generator (to highlight the best images)
• AOS integration (Animate on Scroll)

Installation

Feel free to use this template as the base for your blog. Just download this project and add all the files to your project. Add your blog posts to the posts/ directory, and create your pages with the proper Jekyll front matter (see posts.html for an example).

Installing Jekyll and the dependencies:

# cd into project directory
cd 4dcu.be
# install Bundler if you don't have it already
gem install bundler
# install jekyll, jekyll-archives, jekyll-sitemap, mini_magick and jekyll-paginate-v2
bundle install

You will need to install ImageMagick on your system as well for the thumbnail generation.

NOTE : This theme is not compatible with github pages as it uses a custom plugin. Here is a guide how to host it on github. In a nutshell, the trick is to build the website to the ./docs locally and commit/push this along with the other files. GitHub can then be set up to host the site directly from the ./docs folder.

Building the site

On windows you can use the batch files included. run_server.bat will start the development server and the site will become available locally on localhost:4000. To build the site into the docs folder (requirement to host on GitHub) use run_build.bat

run_server.bat
run_build.bat

The command to start the dev server is (without using the batch file):

bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config_dev.yml

The underlaying command to (re-)build the website is:

bundle exec jekyll build --config _config.yml

Configuration

All configuration options can be found in _config.yml.

Site Settings

• title: The title for your site. Displayed in the navigation menu, the index.html header, and the footer.
• subtitle: The subtitle of your site. Displayed in the index.html header.
• email: Your email address, displayed with the Contact info in the footer.
• name: Your name. Currently unused.
• description: The description of your site. Used for search engine results and displayed in the footer.
• baseurl: The subpath of your site (e.g. /blog/).
• url: The base hostname and protocol for your site.
• cover: The relative path to your site's cover image.
• logo: The relative path to your site's logo. Used in the navigation menu instead of the title if provided.
• sticker: The relative path to your site's sticker/mascot, can be added behind the page title.
• thumbnail:
  • resize_dimensions: e.g. '430x288^' size of the thumbnails
  • crop_dimensions: e.g. '430x288+0+0' how to crop the thumbnail

Build Settings

• markdown: Markdown parsing engine. Default is kramdown.
• inter_post_navigation: Whether to render links to the next and previous post on each post.

Pagination settings

See the documentation for jekyll-paginate-v2 for more details.

Archive Settings

Although this theme comes with a combined, categorized archive (see posts.html), you can enable further archive creation thanks to jekyll-archives. Support for category and tag archive pages is included, but you can also add your own archive pages for years, months, and days.

To change archive settings, see the jekyll-archives section of _config.yml:

jekyll-archives:
  enabled:
    - categories
    - tags
  layout: 'archive'
  permalinks:
    category: '/category/:name/'
    tag: '/tag/:name/'

A sitemap is also generated using jekyll-sitemap.

Social Settings

Your personal social network settings are combined with the social sharing options. In the social section of _config.yml, include an entry for each network you want to include. For example:

social:
  - name: Twitter                             # Name of the service
    icon: twitter                             # Font Awesome icon to use (minus fa- prefix)
    username: ProostSebastian                 # (User) Name to display in the footer link
    url: https://twitter.com/ProostSebastian  # URL of your profile (leave blank to not display in footer)
    desc: Follow me on Twitter                # Description to display as link title, etc
    share: true                               # Include in the "Share" section of posts

Social Protocols

Using the Open Graph Protocol or Twitter Card metadata, you can automatically set the images and text used when people share your site on Twitter or Facebook. These take a bit of setup, but are well worth it. The relevant fields are at the end of the _config.yml file.

Also there is another protocol, the Open Source protocol, for saying where your site is hosted if the source is open. This helps develops more easily see your code if they are interested, or if they have issues. For more, see http://osprotocol.com.

Category Descriptions

You can enhance the posts.html archive page with descriptions of your post categories. See the descriptions section of _config.yml:

# Category descriptions (for archive pages)
descriptions:
  - cat: jekyll
    desc: "Posts describing Jekyll setup techniques."

Custom Page-Specific Javascript

You can add page-specific javascript files by adding them to the top-level /js directory and including the filename in the custom_js page's configuration file:

# Custom js (for individual pages)
---
layout: post
title:  "Dummy Post"
date:   2020-02-09 12:00:00
author: Sebastian Proost
categories: Dummy
custom_js:
- Popmotion
- Vue
---

The /js/ directory would contain the corresponding files:

$ ls js/
Popmotion.js Vue.js

Modifying the theme

Updating Header and Footer Links

Links in the header and footer are auto-generated. Links will be made for all files marked category: page, that have a title, and have the custom main_nav front-matter variable set to true. You can modify the rules for link generation in _layouts/nav_links.html.

Updating Styles

If you want change the CSS of the theme, you'll probably want to check out these files in the _sass/ directory:

• base/_variables.scss: Common values found throughout the project, including base font size, font families, colors, and more.
• base/_typography.scss: Base typography values for the site (see typography.html for a demonstration)
• _layout.scss: The primary styles for the layout and design of the theme.
• Update the images for logo, stickers ... in assets/

Important Variables

Here are the important variables from base/_variables.scss you can tweak to customize the theme to your liking:

• $base-font-family: The font-family of the body text. Make sure to @import any new fonts!
• $heading-font-family: The font-family of the headers. Make sure to @import any new fonts!
• $base-font-size: The base font-size. Defaults to $em-base from Bourbon (bourbon/settings/_px-to-em.scss).
• $base-font-color: The color for the body text.
• $action-color: The color for links in the body text.
• $highlight-color: The color for the footer and page headers (when no cover image provided).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.MD.

Acknowledgements

4DCu.be is based on a jekyll theme by Ben Centra.

Which includes these awesome libraries:

• Bourbon
• Neat
• Bitters
• Refills
• Font Awesome
• Lightgallery
• AOS