jekyll-bear-theme

jekyllBear

An easy to use, minimal, text focused Jekyll theme

Bear Blog is "a blogging platform where words matter most".

This is a port of it's theme to Jekyll, with some tweaks. So you can use GitHub Pages to host your blog while getting the same awesome Bear Blog feels.

Stop worrying about the style, focus on your writing.

• Looks great on any device
• Tiny, optimized, and awesome pages, with a 100 on PageSpeed Insights
• No trackers, ads, or scripts, did I mention minimal already?
• Auto light and dark themes
• Tag support, to filter blog pages
• Quick, 15 minute setup
• Gallery view for your images
• Code highlighting
• Life in Weeks visualization - Interactive timeline of your life events
• IBM Plex Mono typography - Consistent monospace font across all elements
• Pine Forest color palette - Cool, nature-inspired greens with automatic dark mode

Screenshots

Home

Blog

Long Form

Poetry

Life

Installation

Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "jekyll-bear-theme"

And add this line to your Jekyll site's _config.yml:

theme: jekyll-bear-theme

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install jekyll-bear-theme

Design Philosophy

jekyllBear now features a monospace-first design with IBM Plex Mono typography, creating a technical yet natural aesthetic. The pine forest color palette provides visual tranquility while maintaining excellent readability across light and dark modes, evoking the calm and focus of a peaceful woodland environment.

Customization

The theme's CSS is now highly modular and customizable:

• Typography: Modify --font-main, --font-secondary, and --font-monospace variables
• Spacing: Use the standardized spacing scale for consistent layouts
• Colors: All theme colors are centralized in CSS custom properties for easy customization
• Pine Forest Palette: Cool greens ranging from light pine mist to deep forest shadows
• Glow Effects: Configurable glow colors via --glow-color-light and --glow-color-medium
• Layout: Responsive design with mobile-first approach

Usage

Basic Setup

Create a new repository for your website (if necessary)

jekyll new my_website

Copy over the following content from this repository, to serve as a base setup

/posts      -> Where you will write your posts
/_my_tags   -> Where you will define your tags, if you need to add anything new
blog.md     -> Homepage for your blog
index.md    -> Website homepage
life.md     -> Life in weeks visualization page (optional)
404.html    -> When a page is not available

You will need to update _config.yml. Copy over the lines after

#########################
# more settings

in the _config.yml present in this repository to your website repository _config.yml.

Any new links you want to add to the navbar goes here, towards the end. This also defines the bits about tags and filtering.

Life in Weeks Feature

To use the new Life in Weeks visualization:

• Create your life data: Copy _data/life-in-weeks.yml and customize it with your own life events
• Add the life page: Copy life.md and update the start_date and end_year parameters
• Configure navigation: The "Life" link will automatically appear in your navigation

Life Data Format

Events in _data/life-in-weeks.yml follow this structure:

'YYYY-MM-DD':
  - name: "Event name"
    desc: "Optional description shown in tooltip"
    category: "category_name"
    link: "https://optional-link.com"
    tags: ["tag1", "tag2"]

Blog Post Types

There should be 3 kinds of blog posts in the posts folder, an example of each type you can use:

• long-form reading
• poetry
• gallery view

Use them as templates for your front matter.

To test your theme, run bundle exec jekyll serve and open your browser at http://localhost:4000.

See life.md, _layouts/life-in-weeks.html, and assets/life-carousel.js for implementation details.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/knhash/jekyllBear. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

Development

To set up your environment to develop this theme, run bundle install.

Your theme is setup just like a normal Jekyll site! To test your theme, run bundle exec jekyll serve and open your browser at http://localhost:4000. This starts a Jekyll server using your theme. Add pages, documents, data, etc. like normal to test your theme's contents. As you make modifications to your theme and to your content, your site will regenerate and you should see the changes in the browser after a refresh, just like normal.

When your theme is released, only the files in _layouts, _includes, _sass and assets tracked with Git will be bundled. To add a custom directory to your theme-gem, please edit the regexp in jekyllBear.gemspec accordingly.

License

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