I highly recommend skeleton.css (getskeleton.com) as a minimal theme for bootstrapping any website. Almost no learning curve, and it looks good, even if you don't use the HTML it prefers.
That said, I have customized it a bit, but it's fine right out of the game, especially the typography.
Main difference I find is a little more styling/ramp up and quotient-based gridding (you can attach semantically named classes for 1/3rd of the space or 2/5ths)
I've got basic Skeleton and Pure CSS sites for Jekyll available on GitLab below, since these are my two favorite starting points. My minor changes in adapting them to Jekyll are released to the public domain.
Thanks for sharing. I've come across Skeleton before but not Pure.
Pure looks amazing. I especially love the fact that it's modular. The base is only 1.1 KB, and if you don't need anything other than buttons and grids, you can get by with less than 3 KB of CSS!
Yeah, it's definitely conceptually similar to Skeleton (I think Skeleton is lighter though), but I remember seeing Pure first and feeling like it was such a breath of fresh air compared to the weight of bootstrap
purecss is no longer in development. I've used it and it was a good start, but I've since shifted to using bourbon/neat, which is more a library than a framework and has a light footprint.
https://github.com/yahoo/pure/issues/414#issuecomment-132315...
"Pure is still alive, but don't expect a lot of changes. It's stable and useful. It will never grow into a full-blown component library with tons of features. It likely will remain close to its current form for some time to come, with only minor bug fixes. Right now, there are some bugs we want to fix, but they are small bugs with the Pure website, not with Pure itself.
We'll probably have to revise the roadmap or the expectations for the year.
The YUI theme generator is gone now that YUI is gone. The guy who supported that piece left Yahoo about a year ago.
"
My thoughts exactly, as far as I'm concerned, pure is basically done. I feel like bourbon/neat already fails the simplicity test, since it's two parts for some reason.
[EDIT] - yeah I just took a look at bourbon/neat, and I see now, it's for people who prefer SASS? outside of that I see what you mean (by comment)
I've used skeleton A LOT for a quick and dirty responsive css framework. But unfortunately, the latest version doesn't support nested columns. A big disadvantage, IMO.
Middleman is amazing, I build all of my sites with it...it's a nice mix of Jekyll's ease with the flexibility of being able to write as much templating/backend logic as you need (basically, the ability to use Erb). For any site in which you don't need a database, in which your content can be serialized as several hundred JSON/yaml objects, I think Middleman is fantastic.
+1, I started with Jekyll for my personal site but quickly switched. Ultimately I found Middleman had much more functionality baked in, especially things like the ability to use a yaml file of projects to drive a portfolio page, or to fetch a series of release URLs from GitHub and include them on a page upon build. Probably all possible with Jekyll, but not as easily at the time. YMMV.
Jekyll now supports data files that can be used in roughly the same way...so I've actually been able to build decent sites with just Jekyll, when I need to collaborate with someone else, as Jekyll is much more common a platform and has the bonus of being able to "just work" with Github pages if you don't add any plugins.
What exactly opinions do you want? I tried all of that stuff except of Middleman and ended up writing my own. Jekyll is way too opinionated, no way to make the website exactly what you want it to be. Hakyll is very configurable, but the very fact that it's written in Haskell and needs to be recompiled after every structural change turned out to be way more annoying than I thought. Pelican would be nice, but the last I checked it was quite unstable and buggy, unlike Jekyll and Hakyll. In the end I thought that writing 200 lines of Python code to do exactly what I want is easier, than to explore what's out there and how to make it to do what I want.
Hakyll is fantastic -- works great as a blog, but is also very extensible. I used Nanoc before that and it was also excellent.
I don't think you want Pelican or Jekyll in this case. Their emphasis is definitely on blogging and you'll have to fight them some if you move away from that niche.
I haven't used Hugo but my entire site is generated with Hakyll: http://mark.reid.name/ . I've found it works well for a mixture of blogging and more static content.
Hakyll will be very similar to something like Nanoc. The difference will be mainly in the language and ecosystem -- compared to normal languages Haskell is pretty weird.
That said, Haskell is also _incredibly awesome_ and especially well suited to static site generation. Plus Pandoc is possibly the best format conversion tool out there. But I would only use if if you either already know Haskell or are curious and will enjoy playing around and learning new things.
I tried Pelican just to see how they work and what's so special about static site generators. The downside for me was having to go through the process of re-generating the site and committing just so you can fix something as simple as a grammar error or a comma. It gets old fast IMO. The other annoyance was with images included in the post. You have to copy then write the image path because you don't have something like a pop-up box which just selects the image.
So I switched to ghost and I'm fairly happy for now. The downside of this is that I have to pay ~$4 a month for a shared hosting, which is fine by me.
I've yet to try it but that's the downside that would slightly annoy me. Probably not enough to turn me off of it, but maybe. Would post-commit hooks and some kind of automation make it easier?
Hugo has an option built-in to watch the directory and rebuild pages automatically. It can also reload the browser automatically using the optional LiveReload plugin: http://gohugo.io/overview/usage/
Jekyll has a huge community, is actively maintained (it being the backbone of GitHub’s blog system) with plenty of plugins, and has pretty decent documentation (that can always be expanded with a pull request).
I find those factors tend to trump smaller shortcomings. There’s always going to be some stuff, but being able to ask a question and get an answer is very important. Take that from someone who did his first static blog in Blogofile …
Windows support has been non-existent, which is obviously huge to some, but Jekyll 3 aims to remedy that. I haven’t played around with Jekyll 3 on Windows, though, so you only have their word for it. Ruby on Windows is already … interesting.
I've used Jekyll (quite a bit), Metalsmith, and Hugo and tested some others. They all fit a particular use-case, like Hugo is incredibly fast, Metalsmith is incredibly flexible (it's something like a Gulp for static sites), and Jekyll is well-rounded, has a large community, and has the most progress with content editors for non-technical users.
I run a site with resources for static site generators, The New Dynamic, and you can find a lot of articles on those and others there: http://www.thenewdynamic.org/
I'm using Jekyll for my portfolio, and it is working out quite well. Unfortunately, I can't get paging to work on multiple collections at once. So it would be great for a site that's ONLY a blog or ONLY a portfolio, but I recently added a blog and it seems to be holding me back.
I think they are great, but because statically generated sites can limit growth, just because if you want to add backend features (forms, commenting, etc.), you may have to switch platforms or use third party services.
I host my own blog on Jekyll and that works awesomely well and I have no plans for needing a backend server. If I was a startup and wanted to add small marketing features (email collection, surveys, etc.) then I would consider moving off of it.
It's amazing how companies can charge almost the same for what's essentially an HTTP handler that saves a few POSTed field as Netflix charges for streaming unlimited films and series.
And yet, I can totally see why it makes sense to pay, since handling yet another service that you must keep up is just annoying and time-consuming.
I use jekyll but since I've been learning Go I have wanted to use Hugo which seems to have a lot of nice features. Middleman seems to have the most features though.
Still, it's nice that jekyll doesn't require much work to deploy to github.
Always nice to see works striving for minimalism. Years ago I was also looking for a simple theme, bumped into Scribble, and forked into Klotter (swedish for scribble).
FYI: The Dr Jekyll's Themes Directory @ http://drjekyllthemes.github.io lists 100+ ready-to-use (fork) Jekyll themes including some more minimal themes.
It doesn't seem to support pagination, e.g. 10 posts per page, next/prev buttons, etc. Is that a Jekyll limitation, or a theme limitation? If the latter, would a reasonably competent Jekyll user be able to implement that?
Disadvantages of using Disqus as your commenting system:
1. Your comments are in disqus, and not local to your server
2. Users with JS disabled are not going to see the comments
3. Friends and other would-be commenters may be banned by Disqus without having been banned by you.
As to point 1, I believe there's an API that you can retrieve your messages from if you ever want to migrate away from Disqus, but the other two (I think) hold true no matter what.
That said, I have customized it a bit, but it's fine right out of the game, especially the typography.