This is a follow up to my first post on Blogging for free with Jekyll.

According to the Midnight theme documentation I had assumed that updating the Jekyll theme was going to be as easy as updating the theme in _config.yml. I was wrong.

After following the instructions:

To use the Midnight theme:

  1. Add the following to your site’s _config.yml:

    theme: jekyll-theme-midnight

The command bundle exec jekyll build resulted in the following warnings:

Build Warning: Layout 'post' requested in _posts/2020-08-29-blogging-for-free-wth-jekyll.md does not exist.
Build Warning: Layout 'page' requested in about.md does not exist.
Build Warning: Layout 'home' requested in index.md does not exist.

My take on this is that the original theme minima had layouts that the jekyll-theme-midnight theme doesn’t. My initial thoughts on resolving this issue was to copy the referenced layouts defined for minima (located at vendor/bundle/ruby/2.6.0/gems/minima-2.5.1/_layouts) into a new _layouts folder in the root of the repository.

The result…?

Jekyll screenshot 1 …success!

The good news is that fixed the problem. However I wasn’t quite happy with all aspects of the theme so I thought I would start with some lite customization.

Step 1: Copy the jekyll-theme-midnights default layout (vendor/bundle/ruby/2.6.0/gems/jekyll-theme-midnight-0.1.1/_layouts/default.html) to the root _layouts folder.

Step 2: Remove the bits that I didn’t want. Namely the header and the Project maintained by section. Deleting:

<div id="header"><!-- ... --></div>

<span class="credits left"><!-- ... --></span>

<span class="credits right"><!-- ... --></span>

The result…?

Jekyll screenshot 2 …better, but lots of space.

Step 3: Override the styles with assets/css/style.scss.

---
---

@import '{{ site.theme }}';

section {
  margin-top: 0px;

  #title {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0 0 5px 0;
  }
}

Jekyll screenshot 3 …better, much better…

I started this post thinking that modifying the theme would be a straight forward exercise. However, due to missing layouts in the new theme switching themes turned out to be a little more involved.

The silver lining is that resolving the issue exposed me to Jekyll’s theming system (a little earlier than I had planned). It was pretty straight forward and I was able to apply my own small customizations to the Midnight theme. There are still more customizations that I would like to make over time, but it’s a good start.

Next I’d like to have a go at integrating with Google Analytics. Check in later for an update on that.