How this works

regular jekyll setup stuff

Content Organization

This site uses jekyll collections to organize most of the content

academic

This collection is the sections on the front page /index. There should be any header sections for the main page here as well as markdown files for the content collections as described in the next section.

Minimal yml example:

---
title: "home"
display: "About"
news: news
---

if the news key is used, then this section will have a News list on the front page, taking the 3 most recent posts with this category and listing the headline if available or title with a link to the post main page. The keyword News will link to the category page for that type of news

content collections

These are the sections [research, teaching, service] each of these (and any additional similar sections) should have a directory named accordingly and be added to the _config.yml

To generate the /collection/ page there needs to be a file somewhere with the following yaml excerpt (mostly in _academic)

itemdata: <related collection name>
layout: collectionmain

For each of these collections, there needs to be a markdown in /_academic. This text from there will also be displayed at the top of the /collection/ page.

• itemdata must match the collection name exactly this will add the more info bar at the bottom of the section on the front page and fill this markdown content to the collection page

gallery

on these pages, add the following to yaml to add link/gallery content at the bottom. The icon names are without the fa prefix, but include any font-awesome icon

gallery:
  - [<icon name>, link content]

category

This is a processing collection to generate pages of blog content these are just yaml header matter to make the _layout/category.html page works

type:blog is required on all pages that need to use the blognav, this is flagged in _layout/main to change the width of the <main> section by setting the class

---
layout: category
title: As it should display
category: "Grad School"
type: blog
---

Layouts

default

shell ofthe page, outer content, mostly meta

main

generally always used

Notes

To do: add feature for pinned project/item to index.html, use collectionmain as reference to get it. Allow pinned collection item to be set by id in _academic post and then pulled into page, no requirement to edit actual item to pin/unpin a post. Bonus, allow pinning on collection main for sort.

al-folio

A simple and clean Jekyll theme for academics.

Originally, al-folio was based on the *folio theme (published by Lia Bogoev and under the MIT license). Since then, it got a full re-write of the styles and many additional cool features. The emphasis is on whitespace, transparency, and academic usage: theme demo.

Getting started

For more about how to use Jekyll, check out this tutorial. Why Jekyll? Read this blog post!

Installation

Assuming you have Ruby and Bundler installed on your system (hint: for ease of managing ruby gems, consider using rbenv), first fork the theme from github.com:alshedivat/al-folio to github.com:<your-username>/<your-repo-name> and do the following:

$ git clone [email protected]:<your-username>/<your-repo-name>.git
$ cd <your-repo-name>
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec jekyll serve

Now, feel free to customize the theme however you like (don't forget to change the name!). After you are done, commit your final changes. Now, you can deploy your website to GitHub Pages by running the deploy script:

$ ./bin/deploy [--user]

By default, the script uses the master branch for the source code and deploys the webpage to gh-pages. The optional flag --user tells it to deploy to master and use source for the source code instead. Using master for deployment is a convention for user and organization pages.

Note: when deploying your user or organization page, make sure the _config.yml has url and baseurl fields as follows.

url: # should be empty
baseurl:  # should be empty

Usage

Note that _pages/about.md is built to index.html in the published site. There is therefore no need to have a separate index page for the project. If an index page does exist in the root directory then this will prevent _pages/about.md from being added to the built site.

Features

Ergonomic Publications

Your publications page is generated automatically from your BibTex bibliography. Simply edit _bibliography/papers.bib. You can also add new *.bib files and customize the look of your publications however you like by editing _pages/publications.md.

Keep meta-information about your co-authors in _data/coauthors.yml and Jekyll will insert links to their webpages automatically.

Collections

This Jekyll theme implements collections to let you break up your work into categories. The example is divided into news and projects, but easily revamp this into apps, short stories, courses, or whatever your creative work is.

To do this, edit the collections in the _config.yml file, create a corresponding folder, and create a landing page for your collection, similar to _pages/projects.md.

Two different layouts are included: the blog layout, for a list of detailed descriptive list of entries, and the projects layout. The projects layout overlays a descriptive hoverover on a background image. If no image is provided, the square is auto-filled with the chosen theme color. Thumbnail sizing is not necessary, as the grid crops images perfectly.

Theming

Six beautiful theme colors have been selected to choose from. The default is purple, but quickly change it by editing $theme-color variable in the _sass/variables.scss file (line 72). Other color variables are listed there, as well.

Photos

Photo formatting is made simple using rows of a 3-column system. Make photos 1/3, 2/3, or full width. Easily create beautiful grids within your blog posts and projects pages:

Code Highlighting

This theme implements Jekyll's built in code syntax highlighting with Pygments. Just use the liquid tags {% highlight python %} and {% endhighlight %} to delineate your code:

Contributing

Feel free to contribute new features and theme improvements by sending a pull request. Style improvements and bug fixes are especially welcome.

License

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