13 KiB
The Plain Libre
The Plain Libre is just another minimalist Jekyll theme that designed to focus on writing matters. This theme is best use for personal blog.
This theme relies on 100% free software, does not include any Javascript and the font used is served from the local instance. It has been tested on Parabola GNU/Linux-libre.
Screenshots
This version compared to the original one 1443d83
- Removed all analytics
- Removed Google font
- Removed Gravatar
- Removed MathJax
- Simpler image handling
- Fully static commenting system
- Full tag and category support
- Excerpts support
- Better search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Compressed html output
- Basic sitemap
- Style
- Changed main font
- Changed background colors
- Bigger font rendering
outline: none
for links- Last post update shown
- Lists CSS:
circle
instead ofdisk
TODO
-
Follow web typography guidelines like these
-
Better mobile support
-
CNAME?
-
shell scipt that builds example posts, images (base64 or similar), etc using:
cat <<-EOF # whatever EOF
so that examples and real blog content can be decoupled. This script will be called using the Makefile.
Theme installation
# pacman -S ruby
$ gem update
$ gem install jekyll jekyll-sitemap
Building and serving
Local serving (127.0.0.1)
$ make
Global serving (0.0.0.0)
$ make serve-global
Tutorial
Commenting system
Overview
This theme handles comments in the most static way possible:
a mailto
link is generated for each post thanks to GMAIL mail aliases, using
the address specified in the _config.yml
file. This idea came out while
reading this
page.
Moreover, for each post a comment section gets exposed. To get comments inside
this section, you must create a new file in the _comments
directory using the
corresponding posts path name as file name. Let's say a user sends a comment
for the another-post
post. The mailto
link will have this structure:
<your_gmail_email>+2017-02-11-another-post@gmail.com
You may notice the substring 2017-02-11-another-post
after the gmail's email
(but it works for any mailer system supporting these kind of mail aliases).
This string is part of the file name corresponding to the post which is:
./_posts/2017-02-11-another-post.md
Let's ingnore the ./_posts/
and .md
substrings for a moment and save
2017-02-11-another-post
somewhere. Since a post may have more than a
comment, we must distinguish between one and another. To do this we create a
new directory using the comment path, like the following:
$ mkdir _/comments/2017-02-11-another-post
and we will save the comment files inside to keep things tidy.
We then create a new markdown file corresponding to the comment, and its file name will be used as an id, for example:
0.md
You can use any non spaced string, and avoid using .md
except at the end of
this file name.
Out final comment path is:
./comments/2017-02-11-another-post/0.md
As a final remark you may have noticed that each comment is referenced as a paragraph (using the id) and that markdown is enabled by default.
Comment attributes
Comment files have 5 attributes:
-
layout
- Always use
comment
as variable.
- Always use
-
date
-
Use the format reported by the following date command:
$ date "+%F %T %z"
-
-
from
- string representing the name or the id or the mail of the person that commented the post.
-
subject
- String representing the mail subject.
For example:
---
layout: comment
title: This is another post
date: 2017-02-11 23:37:05 +0100
from: x.y@y.x, A Mailer
subject: test subject
---
This is a test comment for the `Hello again` post.
```python
def hi
```
Media files
Extending this ideas I came up with the following:
Overview
Just like comments, each media file is contained in one directory corresponding to a post. However, unlike comments, media content may be referenced from more than one post. This is how it works.
File locations
If out example post is ./_posts/2017-02-11-another-post.md
and we want to add
media files to it, we must create a corresponding directory in _media
:
./_media/2017-02-11-another-post
We can now place our file inside, for example:
./_media/2017-02-11-another-post/terminal.png
Possible combinations
Now, let's go back to ./_posts/2017-02-11-another-post.md
. To be able to
display that picture we need to use the include
liquid tag. In the simplest
form the only required parameter is the file name:
{% include image.html file="terminal.png" %}
You can also use the alt
and/or capiton
tags:
{% include image.html file="terminal.png" alt="ter" caption="A terminal example caption" %}
You can also use plain markdown, which is not advisable in this case, since you need to input the whole path:

Calling files from another post
In some cases you may want to recall media files from another post. You can do
that using the otherpost
tag. Let's say we are in the
./_posts/2015-09-09-download-this-theme.md
post.
{% include image.html file="2017-02-11-another-post/terminal.png" alt="Terminal" caption="A terminal image from the other post" otherpost=true %}
As you can see you don't have to specify the full path but only the post name slash the file name. The rest is filled in automatically.
Finally, notice the otherpost=true
tag at the end.
Notice and warning
If you do not include the alt
tag a default one will be provided instead.
This include feature is currently available only for images.
Static pages
Reading this
gave me the idea to move the static pages like index, 404, etc.. in the
./_pages
directory. If you want to add new pages remember to add a sensible
permalink
for each page and remember to keep include: [ "_pages" ]
and:
collections:
pages:
output: false
in the _config.yml
file.
Tags and categories
Overview
In this theme tags and categories are considered the same thing. I will use the word tag to speak about both tags and categories.
I gathered some ideas from here and using the official Jekyll documentation.
A full list of tags is present on the home page, i.e: ./_pages/index.html
.
This list is just a set of links pointing to the appropriate entry in the
./_pages/tags.md
page. This page has that same list as well as links to each
post belonging to a tag.
If a post contains at least one tag, this is reported at the top of the page
with a link pointing to the appropriate bookmark of ./_pages/tags.md
(just
like in the home page). A user looking at a post can see all related posts just
by clicking at those tag links.
Format
The tag entry is optional which means that you can specify from 0 to n tags. If you want to add some, simply write your comma separated list of tags in the front matter of your post:
tags: [tag 0, tag 1, ... , tag n]
Let's make an example. What follows is the front matter of the
./_posts/2015-09-09-download-this-theme.md
post.
---
title: Download this Theme
updated: 2017-04-09 00:29
categories: Download
tags: [download, terminal, image from another post]
---
As you may have noticed, tags can contain spaces.
Once you run make, you should see the following links
just below the Download this Theme
title:
*download* *terminal* *image from another post*
Excerpts
Excerpts are reported in the home page.
Use the <!--more-->
tag inside a post to mark the end of the excerpt.
If this tag is omitted, the first 10 words of the post will be reported
instead. You can specify the number of words in the excerpt by editing the
excerpt_words
variable in the ./_config.yml
file.
If you are not interested in excerpts set the excerpt_enabled
variable to
false in ./_config.yml
.
Have a look at this article for more ideas.
RSS feeds
This theme contains an Atom file useful for RSS feeds in ./_pages/feed.xml
The link to feed.xml
is available in the footer of every page
thanks to a modified public domain svg icon. The purpose is that your readers
open this link with a feed reader so that they remain up to date with your
posts.
A patch has been added to the SVG image because it was badly rendered on some browsers available for Android. See this article.
Search Engine Optimizaition (SEO)
I'm a noob in this field so I followed this tutorial and this SEO checker.
- meta
- sitemaps
- images
- always use alt tags. For images in
./_assets
these are already coded in.
- always use alt tags. For images in
- responsiveness
- the theme is reported responsive by Google
- robots.txt
- social media and other stuff
- TODO
meta and other SEO tags
meta tags are available in the ./_includes/head.html
file. These include:
title
, description
and canonical links.
The description meta tag uses the first available, in this order, of the following:
- Front matter
description
tag - Page excerpt
- Site description
It is advised to use the description
tag since excerpts or the site
description may not relate to the (whole) page content. Here's an example:
---
title: This is another post
updated: 2017-04-09 23:00
tags: [other, liquid, terminal]
description: How to use markdown and liquid to render images belonging to a
post.
---
You can also edit the following variables in ./_config.yml
to limit the number
of words in the description
meta tag. Avoid values greater than 160
as
reported by previously cited articles:
meta_description_words
meta_excerpt_words
meta_site_description_words
Sitemaps
A sitemap used for web crawlers is available thanks to the jekyll-sitemap plugin.
There is also a (very) basic sitemap for users under the /sitemap/
permalink
which has a link for it at the top of each page.
robots.txt
This very important file must be put under the root of your domain. It is used
by web crawlers (a.k.a bots, spiders, etc) to get access information about the
website. In our case it is also important to tell these programs that our site
has a sitemap
. Read this
and
this
for more information.
For example, since this project is called the-plain-libre
and is published
under https://frnmst.github.io/the-plain-libre
, we need to put the robots.txt
file just under https://frnmst.github.io/
, i.e
https://frnmst.github.io/robots.txt
Since I didn't have neither a "user page" nor a domain I created a dummy user
page repository and I copied the
robots.txt
file from the generated ./_site
directory from Jekyll. This
works for me. This means that in my case the robots.txt
in this repository is
ignored by the bots.
I guess that if you have multiple repository pages you can edit the robots.txt file appropriately and set rules (and sitemap locations) for each one of them.
Mobile support
Mobile support is available for this theme through the CSS file. It works but it could be much better.
Avatar
Use a squared avatar in ./_assets/avatar.jpg
.
Compressed HTML output
By default Jekyll leaves lots of whitespace in the html source. You can verify this yourself.
Since useless white space == useless data, we transmit useless bytes, thus slowing down the website.
For this reason I decided to use a compressed html output thanks to
jekyll-compress-html,
which is a pure liquid layout to be used as a wrapper on the
./_layouts/default.html
layout.
jekyll-compress-html is released under the MIT license.
License
Copyright (C) 2017, Franco Masotti franco.masotti@student.unife.it