Personalizing the site

December 2, 2017

An inevitable side effect of templates is that they always need some customisation to make them work for you and start feeling like you’re doing some of the work yourself.

Gotta have a logo

The site doesn’t start out with a favicon and the default Tufte theme has a nice generic badge in the top left of the page. That won’t do for Terminally Foolish, we need something that pops!

Or, at the very least, some simple image that looks like a terminal being foolish. So yeah, a command prompt with a fool’s hat.

Handily the web seems to be full of freebie little icons, a minute or so Googling OK, hand up, I didn’t use Lynx, w3m, elinks, etc for this found a SVG jesters hat that said it was free to use and didn’t even want any attribution. Thanks anonymous designer bod! If you are the designer and that’s not right and you’re miffed, please let me know

A few minutes in Inkscape and Gimp Hand up again, I could probably have done this with ImageMagick eventually and there’s a nice little favicon.ico and a site logo ready to scale to whatever size is required.

Jekyll site details

The main config details for a Jekyll site are held in _config.yml. The Tufte theme adds a few more in the _data directory.

All the structural templating stuff is in the usual Jekyll locations of _layouts and _includes. I’ll waffle about changes in there later on.

The styling is in _sass for the compiled stuff and css for the bulk of the styling rules. More waffle later about that maybe.

To start with only the _config.yml needs attention. I cracked it open altered a bunch of details about the site, deleted a bunch of bits which looked specific to Clay’s sites, and added useful line:

host: 0.0.0.0

This alters the behaviour of “jekyll serve” so that rather than binding the temporary web server to localhost, it becomes available on all network interfaces on the machine.

This allows me to check what the site looks like on my phone, tablet, etc. It also means that if I feel like cheating a bit on my terminal only rule, I can set up a reload-every tab on a browser on another machine and see my edits as they change.