The default Jekyll Site uses the minima theme. This theme is great for getting started with the basic content of the site, but I prefer to know what’s going on behind the curtain. What exactly does Jekyll use to convert my markdown files into a complete static site? To learn about this, I made a custom theme for this site. The theme’s source code is posted on GitHub.

Sometimes, it makes sense to relate posts in a series. A continuation of a story or an expansion of a project are all reasons to continue a post. This post is part of the series Developing a Custom Theme, which details all of the steps that resulted in the creation of this site’s theme.

One aspect of this static site that was looking bland was the code snippets first presented in Customizing This Site. Originally, these snippets were presented as black text on a grey background. To improve the visual appearance of code blocks, I decided to add code syntax highlighting with Nord.

The original menu on the front page was lacking. It only contained a list of the categories of each post I’ve written. However, after adding support for series of posts, I think it would be nice to show the series’ titles in the menu as well. This required making a custom plugin jekyll-groupby and the creation of a new layout called group to display groups of items. The result of the code in this post leads to the menu on the sidebar.